The IT Melting Pot!

This is cool! And I think that it’s a great step in the right direction for many companies! 🙂

Windows Azure Active Directory

Windows Azure Active Directory (Windows Azure AD) is a modern, REST-based service that provides identity management and access control capabilities for your cloud applications. Now you have one identity service across Windows Azure, Microsoft Office 365, Dynamics CRM Online, Windows Intune and other 3rd party cloud services. Windows Azure Active Directory provides a cloud-based identity provider that easily integrates with your on-premises AD deployments and full support of third party identity providers.

Use Windows Azure AD to:

Integrate with your on-premises active directory

Quickly extend your existing on-premises Active Directory to apply policy and control and authenticate users with their existing corporate credentials to Windows Azure and other cloud services.

Offer access control for you applications

Easily manage access to your applications based on centralized policy and rules. Ensure consistent and appropriate access to your organizations applications is maintained to meet critical internal security and compliance needs. Windows Azure AD Access Control provides developers centralized authentication and authorization for applications in Windows Azure using either consumer identity providers or your on-premises Windows Server Active Directory

Build social connections across the enterprise

Windows Azure AD Graph is an innovative social enterprise graph providing an easy RESTful interface for accessing objects such as Users, Groups, and Roles with an explorer view for easily discovering information and relationships.

Provide single sign-on across your cloud applications

Provide your users with a seamless, single sign-on experience across Microsoft Online Services, third party cloud services and applications built on Windows Azure with popular web identity providers like Microsoft Account, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook.

Read more about the service here!

Pricing

Access Control

Access Control is available at no charge. Historically, we have charged for Access Control based on the number of transactions. We are now making it a free benefit of using Windows Azure.

Directory

The base directory, Tenant, User & Group Management, Single Sign On, Graph API, Cloud application provisioning, Directory Synchronization and Directory Federation, is available at no charge. Certain additional capabilities such as Azure AD Rights Management will be available as a separately priced option.

Read more about pricing here!

//Richard