(Cloud) Tip of the Day: Statistics about Azure Active Directory

Here is a great read about how to connect your local environment to Microsoft Online Services such as Office 365, Azure, Intune, Dynamics CRM, Azure Active Directory.

https://blogs.technet.com/b/ad/archive/2015/03/26/what-s-the-best-way-to-connect-to-office365-and-azure.aspx

What I want to pull out of this article are some numbers that are always interesting to seeā€¦

  • As of March 26, 2015, there are 4.9M organizations are using Azure AD
  • There are more than 430M identities in Azure Active Directory:
  • The majority of the 4.9M are smaller businesses and have < 500 employees.
  • A subset of the 4.9M organizations are medium/large and have 500 or more employees. Because these organizations are comparatively large, they account for 93% of identities in Azure AD.
    • 55% of them are using Azure AD Sync (or its predecessor DirSync) to provision identities in Azure AD.
    • 2% of them are using a 3rd party cloud identity service (i.e. Centrify, Okta, OneLogin, etc.) for provisioning.
    • Another 2% use a wide variety of home grown and custom provisioning tools.
    • The remainder are using one of our portals (Azure or Office365) and PowerShell scripts for provisioning.
  • There are over 1B authentications per day to Azure AD
  • 56% are cloud only authentications and completed directly by Azure AD
  • 32% are authentications completed by an ADFS server deployed at a customer site
  • 7% are authentications completed using a password that was synced from on-premises using our Password Sync feature
  • Just over 1% are authentications completed by syndication partners (i.e. large companies who resell Microsoft services)
  • Just under 1% are authentications completed by a 3rd third party federation server (i.e. CA Site Minder, Ping, etc.)
  • Just under 1% are authentications completed by a 3rd party identity service (i.e. a company like Centrify, Okta, OneLogin, etc.)
  • The remaining 1% are completed with a variety of open source and custom solutions.