ADFS vs Azure AD for SSO

Hello Neil,

All of this feedback is fantastic. I would also like to add a few more things to think about. AD FS will authenticate your cloud or synchronized identities on premises. Many large organizations prefer this federated model because they are authenticating "in-house". With a synchronized solution , Microsoft would be authentication your users. You synchronize your users using AAD Connect and also enable password synchronization. This would mean that we would send your password hashes to your AAD. This is, of course, a very secure solution given that the hashes are hashed and salted, and then some. Nevertheless, you get the point. This being said, smaller organization are choosing AAD Connect Pass-Through-Authentication over ADFS for simplicity sake. PTA can authenticate your users on premises without the IT overhead of a complex ADFS farm. If your cloud application are Office 365 and some Azure Gallery apps, PTA may be a viable alternative. Of course, AD FS is a robust authentication solution with a large portfolio of authentication mechanisms such as FBA/CBA, Claims, oAuth, etc. I hope this helps. - Josh

When deciding between the 2 technologies - If you will be using Conditional Access in Azure, and have applications that do not use modern authentication (Office 2010), you will have to use AFDS to apply conditional access for these clients.

Hi Neil,

In my opinion this is not a newby question. Its a question allot of IT admins are struggling with. 

Offcourse ADFS is a STS and AzureAD a IAM but this doesn't answer the question when to use what. When I am wrong please notice me on this people but my point of view is that the best solution is very dependent on the type of clients the users are using.

AzureAD joined device Windows 10 (build 10551 or newer) work great when we wan't to achieve true SSO. With true SSO I state that the authentication proces is done on sign on of the desktop and isn't needed in any other way anymore when browsing to webbased applications.

When using domain joined Windows 7 or 8.x you need Internet Explorer and Microsoft ADFS when  to achieve this user experience.  

So the best solution to use as STS is also depended on other components (like the Windows Clients) in your environment. 

The most important difference between ADFS and AzureAD looking at the STS component is where the authentication proces takes place. With ADFS this is on-premise, with AzureAD this is in the cloud. 

Also take a look at this great article of Pierre Audonnet.

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/pie/2017/02/06/do-i-really-need-adfs/

Regards,

Mikkie

Hi Neil,

According to me it depends:

1. Where is your identity currently (On prem or Cloud)

2. Is there any special requirement of application which queries other than just user authentication and authorize access.

If you got both the scenarios, publish application.  Assign it to both type of identities and experience. 

If you ask me I would prefer to use identity from on premises(If I already had identity on premises) & sync to Azure AD

One big difference I've seen, in terms of sso and saml is that ADFS has greater support for "claims language" than AAD.  AAD offers limited capabilities or whatever is present in GUI.  For example, I do not see any regex support for claims when using AAD. Its very probably that you won't need them but is worth mentioning.

 In general, for a particular function, an on-prem system has greater flexibility, but it will not get any updates as fast as a cloud one, and does not integrate with other services that are deployed in cloud (like in the AAD case).