Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory (AD) Connect tool has been released for all Azure Active Directory and Office 365 business customers. Microsoft announced the availability of Microsoft AD Connect on 24th June and has extended it to all Azure Active Directory customers. The last update was launched in last December and enabled connection between Active Directory on premises and different directories in the cloud.
 
Source-Â http://microsoft-news.com/azure-ad-connect-is-now-generally-available-to-azure-ad-customers
The Azure AD Connect tool is an enhancement to the beta version that was released in August 2014. The improvements were made after feedback from testers that emphasized that the team needed to make the tool simpler. Microsoft created a stand-alone replacement rather than giving a number of tools to connect on-premises and cloud directories (that includes DirSync, Azure AD Sync, Azure AD Connect and Federation Services).
Microsoft also announced Azure AD Connect Health, a cloud service, which was earlier only available to its Azure AD Premium customers. The service is used to monitor and secure cloud and on-premises identity infrastructure. For Azure AD Connect and the AD Connect Health services, the option to sync and sign-up are still being worked upon.
There was also an announcement related to Azure SQL Data Warehouse, a service that is based on the parallel processing architecture. Integration of Azure SQL Data warehouse with Power BI, Microsoft’s Hadoop-on-Azure service, Azure Data Factory, etc. is possible.
By: Meenakshi Vashisht