Introduction
Over the years, open opportunities for cloud professionals have increased drastically due to growing demand. According to Microsoft, more than 1,000 new sign-ups for Azure occur each day, which equates to approximately 365,000 new sign-ups each year. Additionally, over 57% of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Azure.
These statistics demonstrate that due to the popularity of Microsoft Azure, the need for those skilled in Azure will only continue to grow. Learning how to manage Azure Active Directory is a key role while trying to set your footprint as a Cloud admin\architect. This can also be validated by the fact that “Azure identity and Security” consists of 30% syllabus in the admin and azure architect certifications.
Why do you need Azure Active Directory P2 license
Premium Azure Active Directory features such as Privileged Identity Management (PIM), Conditional Access policy, Risk accounts detection, Access review are only available in AAD P2 license. If you are aiming for Azure Certification or you want to master the skill of managing resources using Azure Active Directory, you would need an active Azure Active Directory P2 license.
But most of us don’t want to pay for premium features while trying these things in our test labs, or creating a POC for our customers, which is why I have comeup with a workaround that will allow you to use Azure free subscription with AAD premium license.
How to get AAD P2 license with free Azure Subsription
The trick to get AAD P2 license with free Azure Subscription is to subscribe for Microsoft 365 developer trial program and then enable a free Azure Subscription by logging in that tenant.
Or you can follow the below steps to achieve this :
1.) You can join Microsoft 365 Developer program using this link. Or you can click on join now below :
2.) Fill in all your details to create a M365 tenant. This will ask you to chose a tenant name that you want to use for this developer program. I chose susbhat.onmicrosoft.com. We will login to this tenant and then enable Azure free trial in next steps.
3.) Once this is done, login to Azure Portal using http://portal.azure.com/. I login using susbhat@susbhat.onmicrosoft.com, this is the email id that I created in second step.
4.) Now, that you have access to Azure portal and have an active AAD P2 licence, click on home and select below option to sign up for free Azure trial
5.) Signup using email id created in step 2, please refer below screenshot for reference, you can chose anything in the Organization section, I use “ABC” since I am creating this for POC.
6.) Proceed with verify with card and finish the setup. There you go, you now have a free azure subscription with AAD P2 license, where I can test all the AAD premium features.
The Tech Guy 