Az- Synchronising New Users

👉 Overview

👀 What ?

Azure Active Directory (Az-AD) is a cloud-based identity and access management service provided by Microsoft. Az-AD enables organizations to manage users and groups, and to grant access to applications and resources. One of its key features is the synchronization of new users, which is the process of creating and managing user accounts in the cloud that correspond to user identities in an on-premises Active Directory.

🧐 Why ?

Synchronising new users in Az-AD is crucial to ensure efficient management of user identities and access controls in hybrid cloud environments. It helps organizations to maintain consistency between on-premises and cloud-based user identities, thereby improving security and reducing administrative overhead. Any discrepancies or errors in the synchronization process can lead to serious issues such as unauthorized access or denial of service.

⛏️ How ?

To synchronize new users in Az-AD, you need to use Azure AD Connect, a tool provided by Microsoft. The process involves the following steps: 1) Install Azure AD Connect on a server in your on-premises environment. 2) Configure the connection settings to connect to your on-premises Active Directory and your Azure AD. 3) Choose the user identities that you want to synchronize. 4) Run the synchronization process. Azure AD Connect will create new user accounts in Azure AD that correspond to the selected user identities in your on-premises Active Directory.

⏳ When ?

The synchronization of new users in Az-AD should be performed whenever new user identities are created in your on-premises Active Directory. It can also be performed periodically to ensure that any changes to user identities (such as updates to user attributes or group memberships) are reflected in Azure AD.

⚙️ Technical Explanations

The synchronization of new users in Az-AD involves several technical components and processes. At a high level, Azure AD Connect uses a service account to connect to your on-premises Active Directory via LDAP. It retrieves the attributes of the selected user identities and transforms them into a format that can be understood by Azure AD. It then connects to Azure AD via the Azure AD Graph API and creates new user accounts with the transformed attributes. The synchronization process is governed by a set of configurable synchronization rules that control which user identities are selected for synchronization and how their attributes are transformed.