Comment by p_ing
8 days ago
Okta was going to charge us $6/user/month just for MFA. So I migrated my company to Azure AD with free MFA. We still had AD DS in the mix, but endpoint management was moving to cloud w/ Autopilot + Intune.
An on-prem AD DS is going to be difficult to move away from. From a management cost perspective, it is still cheaper than every other LDAP + Kerb + endpoint policy solution out there. And since a CAL is provided with every copy of Windows Enterprise, thinking about CALs for clients is a non-issue.
That’s assuming your org is all-in on the Microsoft product suite though (but you do make excellent points on orgs who stick to AAD vs Okta in terms of cost savings). For companies who aren’t, or don’t want to be, there’s a huge gap in the market for a modernized, lightweight, cloud-friendly directory.
If I can have my PDC in the cloud IdP, and rely on containers for replicating at local sites or network segments as needed, then I can ditch ADDS, CALs, and M365 wholesale in favor of other products. It removes Microsoft’s trojan horse product from the enterprise and shakes up a lot of attached markets in the process.