Azure AD joined devices give you the following benefits: This mechanism offers the same benefits of registering a personal device with Azure AD, such as to allow users to sign in to the device using their corporate credentials. Traditional computers and laptops can also join to Azure AD. In this case, although you will have all your applications in the cloud, you will of course still have physical devices – PCs and smart phones – that your team will use to access and work with these cloud applications. If you are a new business or one that is looking to transition away from having any traditional on-premise infrastructure and using purely cloud based applications, then you can operate purely using Azure AD. This is fine, and just means that if you have a password change policy that users will have to do this twice ( and they could of course choose the same password for both). These two sets of credentials are un-related. If you are using Office 365 then your users will have a username and password for that ( managed by Azure AD), as well as a username and password for their network logon ( managed by AD). You use Azure AD Connect to do this, it is a small free piece of Microsoft software that you install on a server to perform the synchronisation.

Y ou can synchronise AD with Azure AD so that the users only have one set of credentials which they use for both their network logon, and access to O365. Office 365 or any of thousands of SaaS apps) then you can happily use both. If you have a traditional on-premise set up with AD and also want to use Azure AD to manage access to cloud applications (e.g.

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