Working for an MSP can be challenging on a good day. The nature of the business includes taking over management of networks that others have managed before us (or tried to!) and supporting things that we often did not setup ourselves.
Among those challenges are things like Active Directory, Group Policies, and file permissions.
Recently I had the opportunity to be part of a discussion regarding how to manage file permissions, when someone said in jest, Google Drive! That gave thought to something I’ve been thinking about for a little while.
What are domains for these days? Well, authentication certainly, and sorting and securing information. Could we use cloud services today to do the things that we’ve historically done on domains? I think the answer to that is yes, but it takes thinking about things just a little bit differently.
The more services move into the cloud (including Azure, by the way) the easier and more practical it becomes, but with things like Identity as a service, and cloud based authentication, it’s not just file management that’s moving to the cloud today, it’s identity management. And in coming years, it’s going to be kind of exciting to watch I believe.