Google Cloud adds a managed service for Microsoft’s Active Directory

Love it or hate it, Microsoft’s Active Directory remains one of the most-used identity services in the enterprise. Google’s Cloud Platform has long allowed you to manually set up an Active Directory deployment, but today, Google is taking this a step further by announcing the beta of a managed service. As the name implies, Google will manage this service for you and automate everything from server maintenance to security configurations.

Unsurprisingly, given Google’s recent focus on hybrid-cloud deployments, you also can use this service to extend your existing on-premises Active Directory domains to the cloud.

As Google notes, the number of apps and servers that rely on Active Directory and that are moving to the cloud continues to increase. Many of these are legacy applications, but plenty of new apps also rely on it because it’s simply the standard in a given company. This also introduces new challenges for IT teams, which now have to manage additional latency and security requirements, for example. The new managed service is meant to make all of this easier and, as Google says, allow “the IT and security teams to focus on higher-value projects.”