Forum Discussion
Is Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Premium still the only way to prevent group sprawl?
- No, as you well mention to absolutely prevent Groups creation in your tenant, you need an Azure AD Premium subscription
Not only am I concerned because properly governing groups is an expensive feature, but if I use any of these features without licensing everyone, then I'll most likely be breaking our license agreement almost immediately. Why? Because our business users maintaining Groups will add people to the group without knowing the license requirements and Microsoft doesn't enforce it when they do.
We enabled Groups creation in late May and didn't announce, nor publicize, it in anyway within our company. In June, our end users created 180 groups, and in July they created another 209 -- all without these features enabled because only a fourth of our users have an Azure AD Premium license. I imagine by the end of the year, every person in the company will be a member of at least one group.
Licensing everyone in my company for AD premium is a million+ dollar decision, so we're forced to govern groups without Microsoft's help.
I agree with everyone here that it's pretty 'unfortunate' that Microsoft has made this decision. Admins can't even govern this 100% with managing licenses. For example, users can create an O365 group through planner even without having a license assigned.
Soon we'll be looking into AAD Premium but it will be costly, no question so I really wish there was another option. Thanks for your input.
- I wouldn’t pretend this is a problem for me it - it isn’t - but Deleted raises an important operational issue. There tends to be a marketing led assumption that customers will buy premium licensing across the tenant which simply can’t be true just based on the economics. With respect to the Microsoft participants in this thread, there needs to be a grown up discussion within Microsoft regarding AD functionality and features and how these match against product features within Office 365. Handing off risk to customers is not acceptable. When Microsoft entered the ‘cloud first’ era I truly believed that some of the on premises licensing nightmare was behind us. I might have been wrong...