Does Quest OnDemand point to a new breed of AD tools in the cloud?

Quest’s OnDemand Recovery Manager is the first Active Directory management tool built on Microsoft’s new Azure cloud platform. In this post, I review this interesting tool, and take a look at a technology that greatly simplifies integrating on-premise applications with the cloud, and which may lead to a new breed of Active Directory tools. 

Quest OnDemand Recovery Manager, which backs up and restores Active Directory to and from the cloud, is currently in beta. I requested to participate in the beta at www.quest.com/ondemand. I few weeks later I got an email saying my account was activated and that I could log on at: http://portal.ondemand.quest.com. The home page gives you the option to logon using your Windows Live ID, or Active Directory Federation Services. I used my Live ID. After logging in you are presented with the screen below and a simple 3 steps you must complete.

First you have to download, and install an agent on any computer on the domain you want to back up. While installing the agent you enter user credentials with Administrator rights. The cloud-based web app communicates with the agent, and instructs it to backup AD and send the files to the web app for storage. The next step is to enter the domain you want to backup. Finally, you schedule the frequency of backups. That’s it. There’s not much to the application.

Its built on Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform technology, that came out of beta Feb 1st. Starting at $0.12 per compute hour, and $0.15 per GB stored per month Microsoft is charging slightly cheaper rates than Amazon’s cloud platform. Software developers experienced with Microsoft’s technologies like Visual Studio and .NET should be able to transition to building cloud based solutions much faster on Azure than with other cloud platforms. The most interesting technology with respect to IT infrastructure, though, is called AppFabric. Windows Azure AppFabric allows software developers to easily integrate on-premise systems with the Azure cloud platform.

Previously, securing applications that extend beyond organizational boundaries required complicated programming.  AppFabric has two modules to simplify this process: Service Bus, and Access Control. Service Bus allows applications to securely connect and transfer data between cloud, and on-premise apps. Access Control makes it easy to build federated authorization into your applications and services. It comes with modules to support Windows Live ID and Active Directory Federation Services out of the box, but can be extended to support other identity systems, too.

AppFabric will allow Microsoft to leverage its huge corporate IT software base by letting enterprises extend their on-premise systems into the cloud and create new types of solutions. However, it remains to be seen to what extent Active Directory management products will be affected by the cloud platform.

It would be interesting to know what readers think about cloud-based AD tools. Does AD management software lend itself to hybrid on-premise/cloud applications?

Tags: Active Directory, AppFabric, Azure, Cloud, Web-based

This entry was posted on March 22nd, 2010 and is filed under Disaster recovery, Management, Web-based. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.