What is Azure Active Directory and Licensing Works?

What is Azure Active Directory?

The cloud-based version of Active Directory is called Azure Active Directory.

Azure AD is an identity management system; we can securely manage both internal and external users by storing user data.

We can perform the below options

  • Add or delete users.
  • Restore users.
  • Add or change user profile information.
  • Reset or change a user’s password.
  • Self-service password reset.
  •  Assign or remove user roles.
  •  Assign or remove user licenses.
  • Create or delete Azure AD groups.
  • Edit Azure AD group information.
  • Add or remove members from Azure AD groups.
  • Add, remove, or change Azure AD group owners, etc.

More than 2800 SaaS (software as a service) applications, including Azure, Office 365, salesforce, Google Apps, ServiceNow, etc., support single sign-on through Azure Active Directory.

Note. Identity management is also offered by Azure Active Directory for SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS applications.

How does Azure Active Directory Licensing Work?

Azure AD utilizes a licensing system. There are two ways to access Azure AD (license).

  • Microsoft Online Services
  • Azure AD Premium Licenses

All the free Azure features are yours if you have an Office 365 or Microsoft Azure license; alternately, you can purchase Power BI premium licenses to access Azure premium features

  • P1 premium licenses
  • P2 premium licenses

You can get a variety of Azure Active Directory features depending on your licensing choice.

Azure AD Free: This is a free license. You will only have access to a limited number of features, such as Office 365, single sign-on, self-service password changes, on-premises directory synchronization, and user and group management.

P1 premium licenses: The Premium P1 offers all the free features in addition to some advanced administration features like dynamic groups, self-service group management, Microsoft Identity Manager, and cloud write-back capabilities like on-premises user password resets via self-service.

P2 premium licenses: Premium P2 offers all the free features, and Premium P1 features in addition to Privileged Identity Management and identity protection features.

Licenses for pay-as-you-go features: The Azure AD Business-to-Customer (B2C) license, which offers identity and access management solutions for your customer-facing apps, is another name for this license.

  • A standalone Azure Premium P1 license costs $6 per user / per month.
  • Azure Premium P2 license cost $9 per user / per month.