I am looking at a solution to secure on-premise applications using a centralized Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution instead of baking a custom IAM solution. These on-premise application could be deployed across several of our customers globally.
I have looked at using the Azure AD B2C for this purpose but it looks like it can only provide Authentication solution and not Authorization, at least not out of the box. I haven't found a single working sample with does both AuthZ and AuthN. I am also not sure if Azure AD B2C is the solution for implementing a centralized AuthZ and AuthN solution. I have looked at Azure B2B briefly and feel this could be right for our use cases, but it is a bit confusing as to when to choose B2C vs B2B.
I am hoping to get any guidance towards the right approach to have a centralized AuthN and AuthZ solution for on-premise applications.
B2B is for partners, B2C is for customers.
You can get authorisation in the application by the application looking at the claims that are returned.
A better way is to implement conditional access.
"Control access based on location, groups, and apps. Conditional Access can also be used to control non-risk based situations. For example, you can require MFA for customers accessing a specific app, or block access from specified geographies."
Related
This is more of an 'Is this possible' question. A developer on the team suggested using Azure AD for user management, but one of the requirements is that the app admin be able to add/manage user access through the application without having to go to the Azure Portal.
So the question is, is the Graph API (or some other mechanism) full featured enough to replace the portal (at least for basic user set up and management) and allow all actions to be done from the application UI?
Thanks.
Simple answer to your question is Yes. Graph API can be used to manage users and their access to applications instead of using Azure Portal. In fact, Azure Portal itself makes use of Graph API to perform these operations.
You may also need to use Azure REST API if you're planning on managing Azure resources as well through this custom application especially Authorization APIs if you want to manage access to Azure resources (Azure Role-based access control) through your application.
Consider the following case, for my application:
I have a website
The website sits on top of an azure api and gets data from cosmos DB
The data from cosmos DB is specific for different organizations
Different organizations should be able to have an "admin" appointed by me
The organization "admin" should be able to add his colleagues under the same organization
The users within a particular organization should only be able to view the data specific to their organization
Considering the above use-case, I have thought about using Azure B2C because:
Everything is already inside azure
I don't want to do security myself
However, I am unsure, if it is actually possible to achieve this with azure B2C? I can't seem to find any similar use-cases in the AD documentation. Hence why I start to think, that I'm going in a wrong direction...?
Therefore, can Azure AD B2C offer, what I want to achieve? (do I need a tenant for each Organization)
In case, Azure AD does not offer support for my use-case, what would you then recommend me to do?
As a white-label service, Azure AD B2C cannot be used as a built-in security provider for other Azure services without writing custom code to translate whatever authorization model you maintain in Azure AD B2C into access patterns for CosmosDB or other Azure services.
CosmosDB does have it's own in-built notion of users and permissions which you might map in some way (using custom code) to Azure AD B2C users. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/secure-access-to-data#users
You could also use CosmosDB's integration with Azure AD (not B2C) for RBAC controls: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/role-based-access-control
Finally, Azure AD B2C does not provide any out-of-the-box administrative tooling for the kind of delegated user administration model you described. Again this would need to be a custom coded admin UI or you'd need to use a third-party solution such as Saviynt for delegated administration: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory-b2c/partner-saviynt
One of my customers would like to know what are all the implications and what all precautions one needs to take before migrating all their identities to Azure and use Azure AD as the main AD. Any kind of documentation on this would be really helpful.
I would also need to show the various workflows how the authentication for a user accessing a particular resource would work using Azure AD and use of various technologies like PIM, CA,Intune etc. Thanks
I have a little confusion about directory sync which is used for AD azure integration.
1) Can anyone let me know, whether we can integrate complete on premises AD to
windows azure AD using this? Or only users and groups?
2) If directory sync will not be helpful for complete AD integration what
method will be used?
Can anyone let me know, whether we can integrate complete on-premises AD to windows azure AD using this ? or only users and groups?
Yes, your on-premises AD can be integrated with Azure AD (AAD) with AAD Connect tool. The integration needs prerequisites you can refer here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/connect/active-directory-aadconnect-prerequisites. It means not all the cases can be done. For example, if you need to use password writeback functionality, your on-premises AD domain controller must be at least Windows Server 2008. Another prerequisite is that if your on-premises is using single label domain, it is not supported. Best to check the link above before the integration.
IF directory sync will not be helpful for complete AD integartion what methord will be used ?
AAD Connect provides set of features to help you build a comprehensive hybrid identity between on-premises AD and AAD. However, if this doesn't meet your requirement, you can build some extensions programmatically to interact with AAD. I don't know your preferred programming language, but here is the Authentication Library (ADAL) which is pretty much preferred for AAD development https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/active-directory-authentication-libraries
AAD not only supports user and group sync, but also for custom attributes, filtering, password sync & writeback or so on. Remember AAD Connect is purposely for synchronization. It does not offer too much for AAD interaction (saying that you need to manage, add more attributes or retrieve user attributes, 3rd integration...)
I am trying to make my way through a lot of Azure documentation on multitenant identity management, for a bespoke ASP.NET MVC SaaS site. It is difficult as it seems that a lot of the online examples and articles are now outdated and not applicable to latest VS templates, and other vague aspects, such as determining what is Preview and what is not. Also, MS tend to use the word "multitenant" when specifically dealing with partner companies who have their own Azure AD, which is not our case.
Our proposed system will offer a web application to different customers. The backend will have a separate db per customer (tenant). The front end will select which db connection (and probably use impersonation) depending on the logged in user. The identity management would preferably be offloaded to Azure ACS, so that in future if we want to integrate with corporations with their own Federation identity provider we can, but for those smaller companies that don't have their own domain, we want to create accounts on their behalf.
I am thinking that a good way to do this is by using Azure ACS (for federating with corporate customers) and a general Azure AD directory (for everyone else), where in the second case I create a group per tenant (customer). Then, in Azure ACS, I translate all claims, either the group from my own AD, or the company name from the federated identity provider, and use that in the MVC app to establish the tenant.
Is this an OK way to do it? Am I overlooking some standard, simple way that Azure already offers? Is this future proof wrt to the Azure roadmap?
for the latest multi tenant samples please see https://github.com/Azure-samples?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=multiten. We are about to release more documentation on how to handle multi tenancy in Azure AD. I would strongly advise against using ACS in any new project, given that we are no longer adding any features and we are actively working on migrating functionality from ACS to Azure AD. See http://blogs.technet.com/b/ad/archive/2015/02/12/the-future-of-azure-acs-is-azure-active-directory.aspx for more details.