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Google announces that it will provide a managed service for Microsoft Active Directory (AD). The service should make it easier for AD users in the cloud to monitor and manage domain controllers.

AD traditionally runs on on premise servers. Today, more and more companies are migrating more and more applications and workloads to the cloud. However, working with AD domain controllers in the cloud leads to more complex enforcement of security and latency objectives.

Google’s service is trying to eliminate that complexity through the managed service that runs AD in the cloud. In this way, companies can automate server maintenance and security. On premise AD domains can also be extended to the cloud. In the blog post, Google also states that the service can be implemented seamlessly in several regions.

“Although you can implement a damage-resistant AD environment in Google Cloud Platform yourself, we believe there is an easier way to use working time for more impactful projects,” wrote Google Cloud product manager Siddharth Bhai in the blog post.

A further feature of the service is that all functions of AD can be used as usual. Think of Group Policy and tools like Remote Server Administration. Google also reports that the service is virtually maintenance-free, with automatic patches and secure defaults.

Good test results

According to Google, a number of customers have already tested the service. Among other things, dunnhumby, a data science platform, has already evaluated the solution. “With Managed Service for Microsoft AD, we can now outsource some of the AD management and security tasks so that we can focus on our core tasks – our customers,” says Andrew Baird, Infrastructure Engineer at dunnhumby.

Citrix has also already run tests for their services running on Google Cloud Platform: “Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service orchestrates the workloads of customers running on a managed fleet of “VDA” instances on Google Cloud Platform. For the AD-related activities of these Citrix products, we saw that the implementation of the infrastructure was significantly simplified with the managed services of Google Cloud, in particular the Managed Service for Microsoft Active Directory,” said Harsh Gupta, Director of Product Management at Citrix.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.