IT departments in organizations of all sizes can expect to be moving resources to one cloud or another in the very near future. This is becoming a fact that all IT professionals are going to need to deal with in the coming years.

One factor that can impact the success of migrations to cloud services is the overall health and preparedness of your on-premises Active Directory. In my experience this is a step that many organizations overlook in their move to cloud resources.

In this blog post, we are going to look at some of the steps an organization can take to prepare an on-premises Active Directory forest before moving resources to the Microsoft cloud. I assume many of these steps will also be relevant for migration to other cloud services, but my focus here is going to be Microsoft cloud services.