Google brings Microsoft Active Directory to cloud as a managed service

During Google Cloud Next, Google shows that it is taking enterprise organizations more seriously. Google already had its own identity platform for companies for single sign-on, but the fact is that Microsoft Active Directory is still the service of most companies. It’s quite difficult to get rid of them, and more and more cloud applications support Active Directory. Therefore, Google has decided to offer Active Directory as a managed service from the Google Cloud.

Many companies use Microsoft Active Directory. Some companies do this on-premise, others have already migrated it to Azure Active Directory, making it easier to link SaaS applications and enable single sign-on. Microsoft Active Directory remains the standard identity solution for many companies because migrating is too much work. For Google this is sufficient reason to offer Active Directory as a managed service. Besides Azure Active Directory, companies now also have the option to bring their Active Directory identity platform to the Google Cloud. This can be done by fully migrating it. There is also a hybrid solution that extends the Active Directroy to the cloud platform and keeps the master server running on-premise. Microsoft also offers this option from Azure.

With Active Directory working both on-premise and in Azure, more and more SaaS applications are supporting Active Directory and single sign-on. Thousands of SaaS apps are easily linked to Active Directory. In order to meet the needs of companies, Google is now also using a managed service for Active Directory. We previously announced that Google now also supports Microsoft SQL Server 2017 from Google Cloud SQL. It shows that Google Cloud focuses more and more on enterprise organizations.