Many organizations would like to "get rid of Active Directory" because of its "hard to defend attack surface". And the replacement technology being envisioned is never an on-premises alternative but always "the Cloud" with its advanced security features, access validation controls and ubiquitous logging.

On-prem is not dead though, and it's not just those highly regulated, air-gapped, isolated environments that require a legacy LDAP directory and a legacy Kerberos authentication provider. The reasons for these technologies are legion, and they are not going to magically disappear anytime soon.

In this talk, we will look at real-life requirements for on-prem identity and evaluate existing alternatives to Active Directory from the functionality, security and manageability standpoint. We will specifically exclude on-prem collaboration technologies like Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business, be it due to them having been moved to the cloud or never having been used in the first place. We will also examine migration, interoperability and security audit possibilities.