Office 365 Interview Questions and Answers – 3

This post focus on Entra Connect and ADFS Servers

How Entra Connect works?

Entra Connect by default is a one-way Sync which synchronize the On-Premise AD objects to Azure AD. Few of the features like Password and Group write-back can be configured to write back to On-Premises AD from Entra Active Directory. Before looking at how Entra Connect works, let us understand the components of Entra Connect.

Management Agents – Question can be asked like what is Management Agent in AD Connect?

Management Agents in Azure AD Connect control the data flow between a connected data source and the Meta directory. DirSync or Azure AD Connect uses two management agents.

• Active Directory Connector management agent 
• Microsoft Azure Active Directory management agent 

DirSync or Azure AD Connect stores the information in two places: Question can be asked like what is Connector Space & Metaverse?

Connector Space: Connect Space has the Replica of the managed objects in the AD DS and each management agent or connector has its own connector space 

Metaverse: Aggregate information about a managed objects (that is, User, Group, etc.) from multiple connected data source.

How Entra Connect Synchronization Intial data flow works: 

1. User object is imported from On-Premise AD into the Active Directory Connector space 
2. User object is projected to the Metaverse 
3. User object is provisioned to the Microsoft Azure Active Directory Connector space 
4. User object exported to the Office 365 Admin Web Service

What is Azure Active Directory, what we can do with Azure AD?

Azure AD is a multi-tenant service that provides enterprise-level identity and access management for Microsoft Cloud. Build to support global scale, reliability and availability. Azure AD is backed by a 99.99% SLA for Azure AD Premium or Basic. 

Used to manage users and access to cloud resources. On-premise AD extended to cloud using Azure AD. It provided SSO across your cloud applications. MFA and Conditional Access in Azure AD enabled to reduce risk. 

What is the Active Directory Federation Service?

Active Directory Federation Services provides access control and single sign on across a wide variety of applications including Office 365, cloud based SaaS applications, and applications on the corporate network. 

For the IT organization, it enables you to provide sign on and access control to both modern and legacy applications based on the same set of credentials and policies.

For the user, it provides seamless sign on using the same credentials.

For the developer, it provides an easy way to authenticate users whose identities live in the organizational directory so that you can focus your efforts on your application, not authentication or identity.