Custom Domain for Azure Active Directory

What is Azure Active Directory

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service, which helps employees sign in and access resources in:

• External resources, such as Microsoft Office 365, the Azure portal, and thousands of other SaaS applications.
• Internal resources, such as apps on your corporate network and intranet, along with any cloud apps developed by your own organization.

Custom Domain for Users

Every user in Azure Active Directory has a username. This user name must have a domain name. Having our own domain name is more memorable and branding than using a generic domain name created by Azure. Our own domain name should be registered in Active Directory. If we don’s have own domain name to register in Active Directory, then we can use a generic domain name created by Azure AD.

Azure creates an initial domain as nootus.onmicrosoft.com (nootus is the name of your active directory). To add a custom domain the domain name has to be verified in Azure. We need to verify that we own the domain name. The administrator can add more than one domain to the Azure Active Directory.

Adding Custom Domain

We can associate a domain name we own with Azure AD. This enables users identified by our organization. Here are the steps to register a domain name in Azure AD.

·         Go to the Azure Active and choose then to the custom domain name              

·         Click Add Custom Domain and provide the domain name you own and click Add Domain

·         This takes to the verification page, which shows the configuration to make in our domain registration

·         Copy the configuration to setup in our domain registration

·         Now head over to the domain registrar. In my case my domain is registered with GoDaddy

·         Create the TXT record in domain management as shown above

 

·         Once the TXT record is created in our domain registration, let’s return to the Azure and click Verify

·         Azure AD verified the domain name ownership and add the Domain name in the Active Directory

·         We can make this Domain name as our primary domain name

·         Now we can see our custom domain name in the Azure AD domain names

With these steps, we can add our own domain name to the Azure Active Directory. After adding the custom domain, we can then add users in this domain to the Active Directory. Please see my other blog on adding users to the Active Directory.