Guest post by Nathan McBride, vice president, IT and chief cloud architect at AMAG Pharmaceuticals. Oktane13 is almost here and I’m thrilled to be a part of the speaking faculty for this inaugural event. I was asked to speak about deprecating Active Directory in the enterprise – or as I like to call it, eliminating the “Microsoft Virus.” There seems to be a lot of discussion right now in tech media and amongst my colleagues about authentication, and almost every discussion stems from the same nucleic decision: when going to the cloud, keep Active Directory or get rid of it? When our IT team started planning AMAG’s cloud migration back in 2008, we initially thought we had to keep Active Directory in order to execute a cloud strategy. I thought, “How else would we centrally authenticate all of our systems?” This past summer, I wrote about how we answered.