AD Minimization: How ready are organizations for the journey?
Microsoft's direction around Active Directory minimization is an interesting and important part of the broader cloud transformation journey. Moving more identity and device management toward Microsoft Entra ID can help organizations gradually reduce their dependency on traditional on-premises Active Directory and move towards a more cloud-first environment. What I particularly like about Microsoft's approach is that this is positioned as a journey rather than something that needs to happen overnight. For many organizations, Active Directory has been part of the environment for 20+ years. Over that time, a lot of dependencies may have been built around it, such as: Legacy applications, Group Policies, Domain-joined Windows devices, LDAP, Kerberos or NTLM dependencies, File servers and other infrastructure, Scripts and operational processes linked to AD. Moving new users, applications and devices towards a cloud-first approach is one part of the journey. The more interesting challenge is how organizations modernize the existing environment while minimizing disruption to users and day-to-day operations. This is where I think Microsoft's phased approach makes a lot of sense. Organizations can gradually identify and reduce AD dependencies while continuing to modernize identity, endpoint management and applications at a pace that works for their environment. I would be interested to hear from others who are already working towards AD minimization. Where is your organization in this journey today? Are you already actively reducing your dependency on on-premises AD? And what has been the biggest area to address so far, legacy applications, Group Policy, existing Windows devices, authentication dependencies, or something else? It would also be interesting to hear which Microsoft technologies or approaches have helped you most during this transition.