Before the internet explosion, directories were important for grouping and managing principles. Principles came in the form of people, printers, email boxes and a number of other physical and logical device types. As the internet explosion occurred, building relationships with customers and partners became important so the number of entity types managed in a directory grew exponentially.
Today’s Hybrid IT environment dictates that customers have the flexibility to consume resources from on-premises infrastructure as well as those provided by service providers and Windows Azure. Identity is a critical element that is needed to provide a seamless experiences when users access these resources.
As an IT organization, your company may require end users to access resources that are located within your network, in an outsourced datacenter which is not part of your network or in the cloud. This type of resource diversification is what we call as Hybrid IT.
This week in Brad Anderson’s “What’s New in 2012 R2: Identity Management for Hybrid IT” blog post, we dive deep into Active Directory both on Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Azure. It is a great blog post that highlights some key scenarios and how to use Active Directory locally and in the cloud. This particular blog post isn’t as lengthy as last weeks, but there is still plenty of information we think you’ll find very useful.
And for those of you interested in downloading some of the products and trying them, here are some resources to help you:
- Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview download
- System Center 2012 R2 Preview download
- SQL Server 2014 Community Technology Preview 1 (CTP1) download
- Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview download
As always, follow us on Twitter via @MSCloud, and you can follow Brad @InTheCloudMSFT!