Usines Azure AD in Office 365 Business Essentials - can we continue Azure AD even if we discontinue Office 365?

Question

We dont use Azure for anything. Never had and dont plan to do so anytime soon. But we did purchase an Office 365 Business Essentials subscription so we could try out Teams for a small group of users. When we did that, Microsoft gave us the ability to synchronize our Active Directory accounts from on-prem Domain Controllers to Azure AD via Azure AD Connect. This has worked well, but we plan to discontinue use of Teams and Office 365. I would like to keep the Azure AD Connect option/service though as it allows us to use our AD accounts as Microsoft accounts. if we dont have Office 365 anymore, do we lose that service? If so, how do we get it back without having Office 365? And are there tiers of services that we can choose from?

Answer 1

Yes, you can still use Azure AD. When you use Office 365 that means you are creating users in Azure AD. You can able to login to https://aad.portal.azure.com and can see all your identities there.

Although you are not continuing with Office 365 business essentials (sad to hear it) still your identities are in the cloud with Azure AD. You can use Azure AD FREE features like single sign on, user provisioning and connect all your apps from Azure AD.

Note that you will not be getting any bill if you dont use the premium services like MFA. If you plan to use our premium features like Conditional Access Policy, Governance etc then you can buy Azure AD Premium as needed.

Answer 2

Do note that you need to have at least one valid license to keep the underlying directory and data, once all licenses expired the data will be deleted.