If your organization uses Office 365, or many of the other Microsoft cloud service, then you have Azure Active Directory.
And just like on-premises Active Directory (AD), Azure AD is the heart and soul of security for:
- Office 365
- Azure – including virtual machines
- Other Azure AD-integrated cloud services
You are probably using AD Connect and ADFS. And when federation and synchronization are working, it's easy to forget about Azure AD. That's dangerous. Plus, you don’t want to treat Azure AD as a separate entity from your on-prem AD or to think of Azure AD as a projection of on-prem AD.
Even with that said, many lessons learned from on-prem AD do apply to Azure AD. For instance, privileged users in Azure AD must be held to the same standards as admins accessing on-prem AD.