It is 25 years since the release of Microsoft Active Directory (AD), and to this day, it remains arguably the most recognizable identity and access management solution, making it a go-to for enterprises.
We think this is a good time to look at how things have evolved since the advent of Microsoft Active Directory—let's look at how the needs of businesses have changed over the years and does this 25-year-old solution meet the requirements of enterprises.
Let's find out.
But before all that, time for a quick history lesson as we travel back to 2000. To an on-premise world, to a world where businesses ran on MS Exchange and Sharepoint, to a world where the word "cloud" meant tiny water droplets suspended in the air.
Let's travel back to a Microsoft-focused world.
The Microsoft era
If you had made a table of your typical IT business stack in the 2000s, it would have probably looked like the below.
This business stack was perfect for the time it was introduced.
Businesses were predominantly running in a Windows environment—email, enterprise apps, file sharing, and everything ran on Windows, so it did make sense to choose an identity and access management solution in the same environment.
It became the default choice.
Often, there are more than one reason for the high adoption of a single solution. While the Windows environment certainly helped, the adoption accelerated because Microsoft willed users into using AD for authentication to Exchange and Sharepoint.
Reason #3 would be the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer Certification (MCSE) program. If you started as a sysadmin in the late 90s and early 2000s, this was an industry standard certification that you could not ignore, a gateway to IT Administraton. This certification led to a pool of talent trained on AD and could manage Active Directory for large businesses.
These were the reasons why Microsoft Active Directory (AD), for close to a decade and a half was the go-to solution for all things authentication and authorization for enterprises.
And that was a great run.
What's changed now
In the mid-2010s, the typical IT stack for a business changed.
Businesses moved from an on-premise world to a cloud world.
Businesses no longer operate in a single vendor environment, having a good mix of Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, thus removing the need to be bound to a Windows server environment to get things done.
The transition was even smoother in the realm of apps. Moving from custom-made on-premises deployed applications, businesses moved towards cloud applications for every business function. Mail and file sharing need not anymore be tied to the Microsoft environment.
Remember when we mentioned earlier that Microsoft mandated Active Directory to be the authenticator for Exchange and Sharepoint? When those applications now have essentially moved to the cloud, do businesses really need an Active Directory anymore?
The keys to the kingdom
Cybersecurity researchers have often used the phrase "keys to the kingdom" to denote a breach in Active Directory, and they are not wrong.
In its true sense, getting access to Active Directory gives the hacker access to a business' users, applications, and resources that they are linked to.
If businesses are not tasked with maintaining a legacy stack for authentication and authorization, they also have to contend with the security risks that come with using Active Directory.
In 2024, the Australian Signals Directorate, the Australian Govt. agency responsible for information security, detailed how easy it is to get access to privileged accounts in AD.
Hackers also exploit the vulnerabilities in AD's delegation feature. This feature was built for privileged accounts like Domain Admins and Enterprise Admins to allow certain services to access critical resources. Hackers are on the lookout for weak delegations and mimic these services to gain access.
While gaps in Active Directory's security have been identified long ago, and identifying weak delegations has become something of a cottage industry for hackers.
Active Directory came out with an update only in 2025, almost a decade after their previous release, a sign of how the product has handled change around it.
The world has changed
The move to the cloud also birthed an age where processes like Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) was required by default, which was not supported natively by Microsoft Active Directory.
With the rise in apps too and to ease the authentication process, businesses looked for Single Sign-On (SSO) for all their apps be it cloud, on-premises or custom applications. The Single Sign-On capabilities were not available natively either but could be achieved using Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS).
But enabling Single Sign-On is much simpler on the cloud.
Cloud directories also quickly adapted to modern authentication protocols such as SAML, OAuth 2.0 and OIDC.
Cloud directories are also versatile; they are scalable to support any number of user identities. They can also be customized by IT teams or Sysadmins to build a security policy that reflects the needs of the organization they know so well rather than being tied to a one-size-fits-all security policy.
IT admins, too, look beyond Microsoft certifications and are more eager to adapt and build expertise in cloud products.
All these changes resulted in a hybrid environment; businesses continue to hold on to their Active Directory setup but use a cloud directory to meet their cloud requirements. These cloud requirements are growing, extending from users and apps to devices and networks.
We believe that change is always around the corner, and if there are any indications, it is the sheer number of cloud-first companies who will do well to bypass a legacy infrastructure system like Microsoft Active Directory.
We also understand 25 years is a long time, and businesses who are fully steeped in the Microsoft ecosystem, for which AD is best suited, may not find an immediate need to switch to a simpler cloud directory. But that day is not far away.
For any other enterprise not deeply entrenched in the Microsoft ecosystem, is it time to leave the legacy behind?
What should businesses look for in a cloud directory solution?
The identity and access management solution is the connecting tissue between employees and the resources they have access to. Businesses need a dynamic solution that solves authentication, authorization, and audits for the modern workplace.
The employees must be able to have a secure and convenient way to access all the resources they need.
The IT admins and teams must be able to provision apps and manage users across the employee lifecycle without too much administrative overhead while adhering to the latest authentication standards like SAML 2.0, OIDC, and RADIUS.
The solution must also be flexible enough to handle multiple user information repositories and be able to authenticate desktops and laptops easily across all major operating systems, namely Windows, Mac, and Linux.
If you would like to see a cloud identity and access management solution for the modern workplace, get in touch with us for a demo here.
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