Why Active Directory Consolidation Should Be a Part of Tenant Migration

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, I'm Cameron, and I want to talk to you today with Becky about Active Directory migrations. So Becky, often when we're talking with customers, they're talking to us about Active Directory migrations, consolidations, things of that nature. Why do you find the reasons exist for them to want to look at things like migration and consolidation of Active Directory? Well, it started out initially as part of migration. They perform a tenant to tenant migration, for instance, but they leave their Active Directory behind and they don't want to do anything with it. But then they realize afterwards that their users are having a really rough time and they are controlling two different identities. They're having to log in to different resources in different ways, and it's quite the struggle and quite the impact on end users. And so they realized that they actually should really start planning for an Active Directory consolidation as well to follow that tenant to tenant migration scenario. And so that's the user impact. Have you seen other impacts as well? Yeah, that's a good question. Obviously, the user impact is the first and foremost one that organizations tend to think of. But often, things like impact to administrators, organizational administrative staff who have to not only look after Active Directory, but potentially have requirements to look at the security posture, things of that nature, start to run into issues with Active Directory when you have multiple Active Directory domains within an organization. Yeah. It's a good point. And you know what's really tough is you can't just jump into an AD consolidation, right? And what we see is that a lot of people have this coexistence period and they're having to live for a long amount of time. And so you have to make sure, even if you're planning for an AD consolidation of some sort, that you can have some Directory integration, some coexistence Directory Sync, things like that. And like I said, I see that with migrations. But my understanding is there are other reasons why you might do an AD consolidation. What are some other examples you've seen? That's a good question, Becky. The reasons that I often talk with customers about AD and consolidations quite often focuses around reduction of risk and reducing things like the attack surface. Because obviously, Active Directory is a key area that bad actors will look for. So organizations are quite often looking to reduce that attack surface and minimize their security posture. So being able to not only reduce risk, but then also simplify the management of the environment that they have as well. That makes sense. And the other thing I've seen is now more and more companies are starting to modernize, and especially migrating to Azure Active Directory, which is pretty new. That's not even anything about a migration or separate environments. That's just truly moving to a brand new place. And so it's great to be able to do any sort of Active Directory consolidation, whether it's on prem or in the cloud. So thanks. This was a really good information. Thanks, Cam. Thanks, Becky. [MUSIC PLAYING]