Forum Discussion
Help! AWS Microsoft Directory Services, Azure Active Directory, AAD Connect Hybrid Join and Intune..
Hey Joe Carlyle,
I appreciate your reply. Seems the length of my post may have scared off a lot of people. Machines are definitely domain joined and it is federated. We definitely have this set up -- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-enable-your-users-to-access-office-365-with-aws-microsoft-active-directory-credentials/.
I have noticed that a majority of machines in the org prior to my employment are in some kind of strange limbo where they were Azure AD Joined but not domain joined which caused for some great head scratchers. Those users could log into their machines, could use e-mail just fine but domain password policies were not applying to them. In some cases, these users would have passwords that had long expired (8-10 months or longer) but everything still worked fine. It wasn't until they tried accessing a newer SharePoint site or some resource that they were being prompted to reset their credentials which brought its own set of problems.
At any rate, since posting this I've discovered that the permissions in AWS' Managed AD solution are limited. In trying to run the Hybrid AAD Configuration, there's a requirement for an Enterprise Administrator account. AWS maintains exclusive rights to the Administrator account and anything to do with enterprise/directory-wide changes.
At this point, we're crossing our fingers that AWS can/will run the configuration with the Administrator account to allow us to set up Hybrid Azure AD Join. Otherwise, we're kind of dead in the water and may need to consider spinning up our own AD and trusting it into the AWS directory if that's even possible.
That AWS restriction really doesn't help you, but it's common for managed domains.
The more control you need, the more likely it is you will need your own full domain. Have you a large user/device base? Would it be worth redoing the lot now that you are in control and have a clear vision of what you want and how you want to achieve it?
Seems like you've inherited two half completed projects!
Seems like you've inherited two half completed projects!
It certainly feels that way! In their defense, a lot of these decisions were made on the fly to get things up and running. I don't think there was any thought about what the ramifications would be going down the managed AD route.
We don't have a lot of devices as we're currently just shy of about 100 users. Some of these users have two devices (a laptop or Surface and a phone). We have maybe 140 devices currently registered into Azure AD. Quite honestly, it wouldn't be a huge deal especially given the benefits that come with having device hybrid azure AD joined. One of the biggest being the automatic enrollment of our endpoints which is an incredibly cumbersome and manual process.
symm_adrian, Did you get any definitive answer from AWS, we are in the same scenario as you, we have AWS directory services and we need to enable Hybrid join.
Hey luissoto, I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish but we managed to set up Hybrid AAD but with everything I read after this post, you should really try to just go straight to Azure AD joining. All of the group policy concerns I had can supposedly be configured via Azure AD configurations so I don't think there's an issue doing everything in Azure/Azure AD.
There are some challenges in trying to use AWS' Microsoft Managed AD as your administrative rights are restricted and they don't give access to the main Admin account to keep management of the service to a minimum. That was basically the reply I got from AWS.
