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With the move to the cloud, and especially Google Workspace, the question at hand is, can Google Workspace replace Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory?

Its a great question and really goes to the heart of what many IT organizations are trying to do. Ideally, they would like to move everything to the cloud and just leave their wireless access points local.

That means getting rid of Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory for many organizations. In a different era, those solutions were the core of just about every infrastructure. Today, thats just not the case. So many organizations are looking to make Google Workspace the center of their IT universe.

Google Workspace, formerly known as G Suite, is a set of complementary productivity solutions. Perhaps the most important component is its hosted email. What started out as Gmail effectively is now an enterprise-class hosted email service. When you add in the ability to have cloud-based productivity applications, such as docs, sheets, presentations, video conferencing, chat, and more, you have the start of what many IT organizations believe is at the core of their IT services for their end users, hence the name Workspace.

The excitement for IT admins is the ability to provide high-quality services to their end users while also reducing their IT infrastructure footprint. Google Workspaces email service is a direct replacement for Exchange. Their Drive product is a replacement for file servers. And, of course, their productivity apps can replace device installed Office and the cloud-based Microsoft 365. With Google heavily targeting Microsoft replacements, its easy to see why IT organizations would think that Google Workspace could also replace Active Directory.

Unfortunately, Google Workspace is not a replacement for AD. Google Workspace directory (in conjunction with Googles Cloud Identity service) is really more of a user management system for Google Workspace, Google Compute Engine, and a select group of web applications. It doesnt focus on natively authenticating systems (e.g. Mac, Linux), on-prem applications, cloud servers at AWS, or VPN / (Read more...)

Originally posted here:
Does Google Workspace Replace Exchange and Active Directory? - Security Boulevard