Windows Server 365 Edition

Windows Server 365 Edition (working title)

This is a new product idea for Microsoft for a specialized version of Windows Server that is tightly integrated with MS365/Azure and geared towards small - medium sized businesses and MSP's.

As an admin that works in the MSP space the need comes from supporting clients that are basically cloud managed but still have a need for on-premise servers to support local network applications (think QB SQL Server) locally. 

The central ideal behind this edition is ditching active directory for EntraID and reworking core services around this.

Benefits

No such thing as local accounts, you log in with your work account and can take advantage of MFA, Conditional Access etc.

Rework Admin Center so you can manage MS365 and the local server seamlessly.

Still provide services like DHCP, DNS, Group Policies

Group Policy would be redesigned to abstract policies to Intune for deployment

File Shares and Security permissions would be tightly integrated with EntraID users and security groups... Having this work with WinClient would be helpful too.

For On-prem applications that integrate with AD for ACL (SQL Server) either provide a service that abstracts EntraID to a virtual DC. OR better yet provide API's for applications to integrate with EntraID or proxied via a service on the server.

OneDrive Server edition to Sync SharePoint Document Library, Aure File Shares etc. that can be shared locally on the network and additional act as a cached proxy for OneDrive on WinClient machines to optimize WAN usage. Imagine your ISP has an extended outage, but you still have access to everything locally and very fast.

PowerShell would come pre-packaged and logged into Azure to make our lives that much easier.

Certificate Services would integrate with Intune's Premium addons and extend that use case.. think device authentication for AP's and Switches. Radius server would become that much more useful if it worked with EntraID.

These are some of the ideas I can think of, but I'm sure there is a lot more that could enhance our use of a solution like this.