Office 365 Things You Need to Know: The Opportunity Behind Identity and Azure Active Directory Premium
One of the great technologies you can leverage with your Office 365 customers is the identity. As you probably know behind every Office 365 tenant is Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AAD). Which in itself is a fantastic benefit for your customers. More importantly AAD provides you some great managed service opportunities to help you keep your customers identities safe and secure. Even though AAD is solid for your customers, you have a tremendous upsell opportunity with Azure Active Directory Premium. Which has some significant additions to really take your customers identity to the next level!
As you may know there are 3 versions of AAD, Free, Basic, and Premium. You can see a comparison of the different versions of AAD here: Azure Active Directory editions. Specifically AAD Premium offers some great functionality, with even more features on the horizon. Listed here are the AAD premium only features:
- Advanced application usage reporting
- Self-service group management for cloud users
- Self-service password reset with on-premises write-back
- Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) user licenses – For on-premises identity and access management
- Advanced anomaly security reports (machine learning-based)
- Cloud app discovery
- Multi-Factor Authentication service for cloud users
- Multi-Factor Authentication server for on-premises users
- Azure Active Directory Connect Health to monitor the health of on-premises Active Directory infrastructure, and get usage analytics.
There are few of those features that are worth mentioning. First is the advanced anomaly security reports. The reporting in Azure AD is a great way to identify any potential breaches before they happen. When you combine this with Azure machine learning you really take this to the next level and really help detect and prevent invalid logins. To learn more about the Azure Machine Learning take a look here: Azure Machine Learning
Second is Cloud App discovery. This provides a phenomenal opportunity for you to help educate your customers on what SaaS applications their users are currently using. It also allows you the opportunity to safely configure SSO (either Same Sign on or Single Sign on) for those applications, providing you with additional value added services to your customer. You can learn more about Cloud App discovery here: Azure Cloud App Discovery
The last feature I would like to talk about is Azure Active Directory Connect Health. Azure AD Connect Health helps you monitor and gain insight into your on-premises identity infrastructure and the synchronization services available through Azure AD Connect. It offers you the ability to view alerts, performance, usage patterns, configuration settings, enables you to maintain a reliable connection to Office 365 and much more. This is accomplished using an agent that is installed on the targeted servers. This really lets you insure the health of your hybrid identity deployments. You can learn more here: Monitor your on-premises identity infrastructure and synchronization services in the cloud
While the price point for AAD premium provides a good upsell opportunity for you. I believe the true opportunity is to leverage the Enterprise Management Suite (EMS). EMS includes AAD premium as well as some great additional benefits. This really provides a cost effective way for you to bring so many solutions to your customers. From mobility, to secure documents and improved identity. Take a look at Josh’s post to see how you can position EMS with your customers: Office 365 Things You Need To Know – The EMS Up-Sell Opportunity & Strategy. The additional benefits of EMS(including AAD Premium) are:
- Azure RMS Premium (Take a look at Woody’s post here: Office 365 Things You Need to Know: Protect Office 365 Email and Office Documents with Azure RMS)
- Microsoft Intune
- Advanced Threat Analytics
As you can see identity can provide a wealth of opportunities for you and your customers. Not only from upsell potential, but a wealth of managed services. Hopefully you are enjoying the series and if you missed any of the other parts take a look here:
Matt Hester
Sr. Partner Technology Strategist