Azure Cloud App Discovery

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Michael Kophs
Partner Technology Strategist

Partners,

A few weeks ago, I blogged about the brand new Azure Identity Management Solution Accelerator, which provides detailed guidance on how to integrate your on-premises Active Directory with Azure Active Directory (AAD).  Why integrate Azure AD with on-premises AD?  In short, this integration allows users to use their on-premises Active Directory password to authenticate to well over 2,400 Microsoft and third-party SaaS applications! 

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Customers should be very interested in the centralized management of all of the various cloud services that users in their organization access every day.  Many of these cloud services house critical corporate intellectual property that for compliance reasons must be centrally managed by IT.  Once a customer is committed to the idea of centralized management of their cloud identities, we need a way to discover what apps in their organization are actually being used. 

Introducing Cloud App Discovery

As part of the initial project discovery phase, partners can install the “Cloud App Discovery” tool (currently in Preview) in their customer’s environment.  After a few days of monitoring, partners can show their customers a dashboard of all of the SaaS apps that are being leveraged in their organization, and provide a report of which SaaS can be centrally managed with Azure Active Directory!

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The next step is to provide the customer with a statement of work for centralized identity management using Azure Active Directory.

For step-by-step guidance on Azure Active Directory identity integration with Active Directory, check out the Azure Identity Management Solution Accelerator.

For step-by-step instructions on setting up Cloud App Discovery, check out the official announcement on the Active Directory Team Blog.

For step-by-step instruction on adding SaaS application integrations to users in Azure Active Directory, check out the following blog.

After following the step-by-step guidance, please feel free to comment on your experience!

Good luck,

Michael