(Cloud) Tip of the Day: Latest Azure AD Statistics

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Today’s Tip…

Here is a great read @ https://blogs.technet.com/b/ad/archive/2016/01/05/best-way-to-connect-to-office-365-and-azure-ad-latest-data-azure-ad-connect-momentum.aspx about usage statistics of Azure Active Directory.

I've pulled out some of the more interesting statistics…

  • As of December 30th, there are now 8.24M tenants in Azure AD and over 550M users (up from 4.9M and 430M nine months ago).
  • The tenants that have more than >500 user accounts account for 91% of all the identities in Azure AD.
  • Of those larger tenants:
    • 75% use a Microsoft sync solution (Azure AD Connect or its predecessors)
    • 21% use PowerShell or the Office365/Azure Admin portal.
    • 3% use a 3rd party cloud service
    • 1% use a homegrown or custom solution

There are 1.3B daily authentications using work or school accounts (Azure Active Directory):

  • 45% are cloud only and completed directly by Azure AD.
  • 37% are federated and completed by an ADFS server at a customer site (up from 32% in March).
  • 18% are completed using a password hash that was synced from on-premises to the cloud using AAD Connect or one of its predecessors (up from 7% in March).
  • 1% are completed by a syndication partner (large companies who resell Microsoft services)
  • Just under 1% are completed by a 3rd party federation server
  • Just under 1% are completed by a 3rd party identity service
  • The remaining 1% are completed by a custom or open source identity server

Other interesting facts:

  • 75% of tenants with >500 user employees using Azure AD/Office 365 are synchronizing their on-premises Windows Server Active Directory with Azure Active Directory up from 59% nine months ago.
  • 25k organizations are now using Azure AD Connect for that purpose and it is far and away the fastest growing solution.
  • The use of ADFS with Azure AD/Office 365 continues to grow. It now accounts for 36% of all authentications (up from 32% nine months ago).
  • Password sync is the fastest growing method of authentication. It accounts for 17% of all authentications (up from 7% nine months ago).
  • The use of third party synchronization and authentication solutions with Azure AD/Office 365 remains flat at ~4% for both sync and authentications.