Connecting on-premises to the cloud.
WHAT SYNCHRONISATION PROVIDES
Accounts from an on-premises directory represented in the cloud directory.
WHY ORGANISATIONS DO IT
Existing on-premises infrastructure and applications, with cloud services alongside.
WHAT AUTHENTICATION OPTIONS EXIST
Password hash synchronisation, where a hash is synchronised and the cloud authenticates Pass-through authentication, where the cloud passes credentials to an on-premises agent Federation, where an on-premises service performs authentication
WHAT TO PREFER FOR MOST ORGANISATIONS
Password hash synchronisation.
WHY
It is simplest, has fewest dependencies, and continues working if on-premises systems are unavailable.
WHAT FEDERATION COSTS
Infrastructure that must be highly available, because its failure prevents all cloud sign-in.
WHAT TO CONFIGURE REGARDLESS
A fallback method, so a local outage does not block everyone.
WHAT TO ESTABLISH
Which directory is authoritative for each attribute.
WHY
Changes made in the wrong place are overwritten.
WHAT TO MONITOR
Synchronisation health and errors.
WHAT CAUSES MOST ERRORS
Duplicate attributes, and invalid characters.
WHAT TO PLAN
Eventually moving authority to the cloud.
