Chapter 22. Into the cloud
If you look up into the sky, you’ll see clouds. They can be dark and forbidding, white and fluffy, or extremely wispy and nebulous. Cloud computing is a bit like that. It seems to be all things to all vendors, and can vary from a nebulous concept to something that appears to be very threatening and will cause you lots of problems. As usual, with any big change in the IT landscape, the truth is somewhere in between.
The cloud is viewed as the “next big thing” in computing. You can’t read anything from the computer press or any of the major vendors without tripping over the term. So what is it, and what does it mean to you as an AD administrator?
This chapter starts by examining the phenomenon that’s cloud computing and explains the types and service models. You’ll then learn how your Active Directory can migrate into the cloud—either totally or partially—and how you can integrate with a cloud-based Active Directory. If you do migrate your organization’s infrastructure into the cloud, you can simplify your AD topology by reducing the number of AD sites. Windows Azure Active Directory is a directory service based in the cloud to which you can integrate your on-premises Active Directory. After learning what Azure is, you’ll learn how to administer the major data types—users and groups.