Book excerpt: Build advanced authentication solutions for any cloud or web environment Active Directory has been transformed to reflect the cloud revolution, modern protocols, and today’s newest SaaS paradigms. This is an authoritative, deep-dive guide to building Active Directory authentication solutions for these new environments. Author Vittorio Bertocci drove these technologies from initial concept to general availability, playing key roles in everything from technical design to documentation. In this book, he delivers comprehensive guidance for building complete solutions. For each app type, Bertocci presents high-level scenarios and quick implementation steps, illuminates key concepts in greater depth, and helps you refine your solution to improve performance and reliability. He helps you make sense of highly abstract architectural diagrams and nitty-gritty protocol and implementation details. This is the book for people motivated to become experts. Active Directory Program Manager Vittorio Bertocci shows you how to: Address authentication challenges in the cloud or on-premises Systematically protect apps with Azure AD and AD Federation Services Power sign-in flows with OpenID Connect, Azure AD, and AD libraries Make the most of OpenID Connect’s middleware and supporting classes Work with the Azure AD representation of apps and their relationships Provide fine-grained app access control via roles, groups, and permissions Consume and expose Web APIs protected by Azure AD Understand new authentication protocols without reading complex spec documents