Everyone knows by now that Microsoft is getting into the cloud business. But for a long time one of the biggest obstacles to corporate customers joining Microsoft on that move was the lack of an identity management platform that could span the boundary between cloud provider and enterprise.

Organizations have spent gobs of budget over the years getting single sign-on (SSO) and single-pane-of-glass identity management working within the walls of their businesses, and they're in no hurry to have to create a separate set of cloud-only credentials for their users.