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AWS and Azure AD: A Match Made in Heaven?
According to Amazon, Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers will now be able to integrate Azure Active Directory (AD) with AWS single sign-on (SSO). This will bring the convenience of the Office 365 sign-on to Amazon’s cloud, and it’s yet another signal that multicloud deployments are the future for most organizations.
Amazon’s decision to embrace its biggest competitor in the enterprise cloud space will doubtlessly make the lives of many of its customers much easier. Office 365 is the best-selling cloud software in the world and is a critical productivity tool for many of its users.
Integration with AWS SSO will allow customers to provision groups into AWS, making it easier for administrators to manage multicloud environments. Where customers would previously have been required to duplicate their Azure AD identities into AWS SSO, with this new integration, synchronization provides needed convenience. Amazon calls this “The Next Evolution in AWS Single Sign-On.”
Our Take
In this case, “the next evolution” is an appropriate phrase. The first stage of cloud competition saw major providers like Amazon and Microsoft compete aggressively to be the vendor of choice for their customers. But as more organizations opt to pursue multicloud strategies, providers are increasingly forced to play nice with their competition. Services like Google Anthos and IBM’s Watson Anywhere have already brought cloud-agnostic services to customers; integration with Office 365 is an indication that Amazon is feeling pressure to make similar changes.