Three Ways to Integrate Active Directory with Your SaaS Applications

The adoption rate of software as a service (SaaS) has been dramatic in recent years, more so in 2020. However SaaS adoption is not without its challenges. SaaS applications tend to be siloed, and that has made managing user access and authorization an increasing challenge. The task of onboarding users is a time-intensive, manual process that involves administrators across multiple departments. IT departments must find a way to harness the benefits of SaaS, while minimizing business risk.

For years, in most enterprises, Microsoft Active Directory (AD) has been the authoritative user directory that governs access to basic IT services. But AD has proven to be a challenge to cloud adoption. SaaS applications have their own native user directories and often are not connected to Active Directory. This is because AD was used to control access to a broader set of business applications and IT systems. It was not designed to live in the cloud or easily integrate with cloud applications. AD’s future is not guaranteed. And yet many companies are still using it today. Thus it’s critical for IT to find ways of seamlessly integrating their applications to AD.

Read this whitepaper to learn three different options for integrating Active Directory with SaaS applications.