Google LLC today announced the public beta test of its Managed Service for Microsoft Active Directory.

Active Directory is a popular if somewhat aging Microsoft Corp. service that traditionally runs on on-premises Windows Servers. It’s used by thousands of organizations to manage both users and access to traditional applications.

But Google says that as these organizations move their Active Directory-dependent applications and services to the cloud, it becomes more difficult to manage and maintain their AD domain controllers, which are the servers that respond to security authentication requests. As a result, information technology teams are struggling to meet latency and security goals, and they face more difficulties configuring and securing those AD domain controllers.

Managed Service for Microsoft Active Directory is a highly available, hardened Google Cloud service that runs Microsoft AD in the cloud. It enables organizations to manage their cloud-based AD-dependent workloads, automate AD server maintenance and security configuration, and extend their on-premises AD domain to the cloud.

“While you can deploy a fault-tolerant AD environment in GCP on your own, we believe there’s an easier way that gives you time to focus on more impactful projects,” Google Cloud product manager Siddharth Bhai wrote in a blog post.

Because Managed Service for Microsoft Active Directory runs actual Microsoft AD Domain Controllers, organization can still use standard features such as Group Policy, and use familiar administration tools such as Remote Server Administration Tools to manage their domains, Bhai said.

Other benefits include virtually no maintenance as the service is highly available, automatically patched and configured with secure defaults. Further, the service can be deployed in specific regions so that applications and virtual machines in the same geographic location can access AD domains over a low-latency Virtual Private Cloud.

“As your infrastructure needs grow, you can simply expand the service to additional regions while continuing to use the same managed AD domain,” Bhai said.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE it was important for Google to support Microsoft Active Directory on its public cloud as a majority of enterprises continue to use the service for managing users and user access.

“This makes user administration and management easy, as it means there’s no need to map to other user management or access management systems,” Mueller said. “It’s a great example of how Google is implementing an “embrace to extend” strategy, going the extra mile to make it easier to attract workloads to Google Cloud.”

Google said interested users can sign up for the public beta of Managed Service for Microsoft AD here.

Image: Google