Azure Active Directory (AD) Domain Services now available for Azure Cloud Solution Providers!

Todd Sweetser

Hi Cloud Sellers! Wanted to make all aware of the availability of Azure Active Directory (AD) Domain Services being available now for Azure Cloud Solution Providers (CSP!) 

Here is some info from recent documentation update:

Overview of Azure CSP

Azure CSP is a program for Microsoft Partners and provides a license channel for various Microsoft cloud services. Azure CSP enables partners to manage sales, own the billing relationship, provide technical and billing support, and be the customer's single point of contact. In addition, Azure CSP provides a full set of tools, including a self-service portal and accompanying APIs. These tools enable CSP partners to easily provision and manage Azure resources, and provide billing for customers and their subscriptions.

The Partner Center portal acts as an entry point for all Azure CSP partners. It provides rich customer management capabilities, automated processing, and more. Azure CSP partners can use Partner Center capabilities by using a web-based UI or by using PowerShell and various API calls.+

The following diagram illustrates how the CSP model works at a high level. Contoso has an Azure AD Active Directory. They have a partnership with a CSP, who deploys and manages resources in their Azure CSP subscription. Contoso may also have regular (direct) Azure subscriptions, which are billed directly to Contoso.

The CSP partner's tenant has three special agent groups - Admin agents, Helpdesk agents, and Sales agents. The Admin agents group is assigned to the tenant administrator role in Contoso's Azure AD directory. As a result, a user belonging to the CSP partner's admin agents group has tenant admin privileges in Contoso's Azure AD directory. When the CSP partner provisions an Azure CSP subscription for Contoso, their admin agents group is assigned to the owner role for that subscription. As a result, the CSP partner's admin agents have the required privileges to provision Azure resources such as virtual machines, virtual networks, and Azure AD Domain Services on behalf of Contoso.

For more information, see the Azure CSP overview

Benefits of using Azure AD Domain Services in an Azure CSP subscription

Azure AD Domain Services provides Windows Server AD compatible services in Azure such as LDAP, Kerberos/NTLM authentication, domain join, group policy, and DNS. Over the decades, many applications have been built to work against AD using these capabilities. Many independent software vendors (ISVs) have built and deployed applications at their customers' premises. These applications are onerous to support since that often requires access to the different environments in which these applications are deployed. With Azure CSP subscriptions, you have a simpler alternative with the scale and flexibility of Azure.

Azure AD Domain Services now supports Azure CSP subscriptions. You can now deploy your application in an Azure CSP subscription tied to your customer's Azure AD directory. As a result, your employees (support staff) can manage, administer, and service the virtual machines on which your application is deployed using your organization's corporate credentials. Further, you can provision an Azure AD Domain Services managed domain for your customer's Azure AD directory. Your application is connected to your customer's managed domain. Therefore, capabilities within your application that rely on Kerberos/NTLM, LDAP, or the System.DirectoryServices API work seamlessly against your customer's directory. Your end customers benefit greatly from consuming your application as a service, without needing to worry about maintaining the infrastructure the application is deployed on.

All billing for Azure resources you consume in that subscription, including Azure AD Domain Services, is charged back to you. You maintain full control over the relationship with the customer when it comes to sales, billing, technical support etc. With the flexibility of the Azure CSP platform, a small team of support agents can service many such customers who have instances of your application deployed.

More details are available on the Azure Active Directory (AD) Domain Services for Azure Cloud Solution Providers (CSP) documentation resource!

Enjoy, and good selling!