The gap between on-premises and cloud access is bridged by Google Cloud’s new managed service. Among the deployed technologies, Microsoft Active Directory, an on-premise environment which provides authentication and access to enterprise resources.
When some form of hybrid development is applied by the organizations and they move to cloud, Active Directory is required and that is the reason why Google has been developing a Managed Service for Microsoft Active Directory. The Google Next Conference that was conducted in April had announced the Google Cloud Service. This service became available to people for the beta version on August 29.
“We launched Managed Service for Microsoft AD in April in alpha and have been working with select customers, including Dunnhumby and Citrix, over the last months to improve the service based on customer feedback,” Siddharth, product manager with Google Cloud, told ITPro Today. “We’re excited to bring the service today in beta to additional enterprise organizations for wider evaluation and feedback.”
Leveraging the AD trust, users can still authenticate from an on-premises AD and thereby have any existing user authentication password policies still apply, even as users access the apps and servers in the cloud,” Bhai said. “This works without a need to sync or replicate any user policies to the cloud.”
Microsoft Active Directory can stand alone as an AD domain. According to Bhai, on being connected to on-premises AD domains, the AD trust relationships are leveraged. All computers, servers and service account authentications are joined to the managed Active Directory domain.
As long as underlying network connectivity is available and AD trust has been established, the other AD could be running on-premises or on other cloud providers,” he said. Google Cloud has a product called Cloud Identity, which is an IDaaS [identity as a service] that includes some of the CASB functionality, including single sign-on, app access control, device management, MFA [multifactor authentication] and more,” Bhai said.
