Opinions on if in 2025 it is a good option to run a small remote office on AzureAD/EntraID only and have no local DC’s? In theory this small office would have 20 desktops max, a single windows server for a custom application, and two additional Ubuntu or TrueNAS Scale servers for image storage and backups (ZFS backed with replication to a remote site). The needs of this location will not allow provisioning the application and storage servers in the cloud but requires local hardware.
Does the requirement for local hardware/services require installing a hybrid setup with local AD infrastructure and syncing to AzureAD?
I’ve never seen an all-Azure-AD deployment work well enough to stay that way in production for more than a year or two. Honestly, I haven’t seen any real benefit from hybrid deployments, either. What you will see is some pretty hefty Azure bills.
You’ll still need a local AD-DS server to accomplish this seamlessly. Unfortunate, but Microsoft hasn’t made any effort to make this easier. They really want those hefty Azure fees; there are so many use cases where Azure/AWS/cloud isn’t the way to go.
Guess I should not be surprised that MS is not going to make it easy to accomplish in a way that doesn’t get them the maximum amount of azure cloud fees.
The place I’m working is 100% AzureAD (Entra…) for 150ish employees.
But, we’re fully cloud .. no on-prem servers or applications. All we have on site is backups and firewalls.