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From Active Directory to AI Agents: The 25-Year Saga of Microsoft's Identity

64 min • 14 juni 2025

In this very special episode, I sit down with the "Yoda of Entra" himself, Tarek Dawoud, who also happens to be my manager!

We dig deep into the fascinating and often surprising history of Microsoft's identity platforms. Tarek, who has been on the team since 2007, takes us on a journey from the revolutionary launch of Active Directory in 1999, through the creation of the cloud services that battled Google Apps, to the formation of the identity division and the eventual rebrand to Entra.

You'll hear the inside story on how our customer experience team became a "secret weapon" and, most excitingly, we'll look at what the future holds for Identity and Access Management in the new age of AI agents.

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PS. Can I ask a favor? If you enjoyed this episode please leave a review and rating! Thank you 🙏 - Merill

About Tarek Dawoud

Tarek Dawoud is a long-time veteran at Microsoft, having been with the company for over 18 years. Tarek currently leads the architecture team within the customer engineering (CXE) organization, where he helps customers deploy Entra, gathers insights for the product group, and works to solve the hardest identity problems.

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarekdawoud/

🔗 Related Links

📗 Chapters

00:00 Intro

08:58 The Beginning: The Vision of Active Directory (AD)

14:51 The Consumer Side: Microsoft Passport & The Standards Debate

18:29 A Defensive Play: How Google Apps Sparked Microsoft's Cloud Identity

27:21 The First Merger: Active Directory & Cloud Teams Unite

32:03 The Birth of Conditional Access & The Authenticator App

42:52 The Security Re-org: Identity Moves to a New Home

45:30 A New Era: Rebranding to Entra

48:52 The Future is Now: AI, Agentic Identities, and the End of PowerShell?