Wanting to know best hybrid option for existing O365 tenancy

Question

I'm hoping that someone can provide some advice on which is the best hybrid deployment option for our situation:

• We have an existing O365 tenancy with Microsoft 365 F3 licenses used primarily for email and Office desktop app licensing.
• We have an existing on site AD DS. They aren't synchronised.
• We currently use smartcard login for AD DS which is a requirement.
• We currently use the authentication app for MFA when accessing O365 email, also a requirement.
• We do not need, nor want to use OWA or any other web based applications, apart from admin. Onsite only.

Ideally, we'd just like to keep everything as is, but to be able to make the most of the M365 F3 offerings such as Microsoft Teams and a private Windows Store, it seems that we have to go hybrid. From what I've read, to continue using smart card login for our local domain, we need to go for the Federation option which seems like overkill.

Can someone please advise which is our best approach to achieve what we want.

Regards,

Answer 1

If using smart cards is a must, AD FS is indeed your only option.