Table of Contents
Introduction
Just a few years ago, the question “cloud or on-premises?” made a lot of sense. Today, the answer is increasingly: both.
Servers can still run locally. Some applications operate in Microsoft 365. User identity goes into Entra ID. Backup is stored in one cloud, the accounting system in another, and the employee connects from a laptop that hasn’t seen the company network in a week.
And that’s exactly why IT management is also shifting toward the cloud.
Over half of companies in the EU already use paid cloud services
According to Eurostat, in 2025, 52.7% of enterprises in the European Union used paid cloud computing services. By comparison, in 2014 that figure was 17.8%. This is a fairly good answer to the question of whether the cloud is still something reserved mainly for large technology organizations.
But it’s not just the location of data storage that’s changing.
Tools for managing devices, access, updates, security, and users are moving to the cloud. It’s becoming less and less important whether a computer sits two rooms away from the administrator or an employee has taken it home 300 kilometers away.
The administrator still needs to know what’s happening with that device.
This is clearly visible in the directory services market
According to a report by The Business Research Company, the Cloud Directory Services software market was expected to reach $11.21 billion in 2026, up from $9.77 billion the year before. The authors forecast $19.53 billion by 2030.
This is a forecast from a commercial analytics firm rather than an official statistic, so it should be treated as such. What’s more interesting than the figure itself are the stated drivers of growth: the rise of cloud-native IAM, Zero Trust, MFA, regulatory requirements, and securing hybrid environments.
This direction is also visible in the moves of the largest providers. In August 2025, AWS released AWS Managed Microsoft AD Hybrid Edition, a solution that allows an existing Active Directory domain to be extended to AWS without building a separate directory environment.
This matters because IT migration rarely looks like turning off the server room on Friday and having everything magically running from the internet by Monday.
The cloud doesn’t solve the visibility problem
We can move authentication to the cloud and still not know what software is installed on an employee’s computer.
We can deploy MFA and at the same time have no information on whether a workstation has received the required updates.
We can secure a user’s account but not know that someone is copying data to a USB drive on their computer right now.
These are different pieces of the same environment.
NIST’s Zero Trust architecture highlights exactly this problem. Trust shouldn’t be based solely on the fact that a user or computer is “inside the network.” When making access decisions, both the user’s identity and the device, along with its current state, matter.
This is probably the most important shift of recent years. The company network is no longer a clear boundary.
So what should an administrator actually see?
They don’t need twenty more dashboards.
They need answers to fairly basic questions: which devices belong to the company, who is using them, what software is installed on them, whether the system is up to date, whether an unauthorized USB device has appeared, and whether the workstation can be accessed remotely in case of a problem.
In eAuditor cloud, this is exactly what the endpoint management layer focuses on – inventorying computers and software, monitoring, managing updates, BitLocker, remote RTC access, and DLP mechanisms.
This isn’t a replacement for Active Directory or an IAM system. And it shouldn’t be.
It’s another piece of the puzzle: IAM answers, among other things, the question “who has access?”, while endpoint management answers “from what device, and what’s happening with it?”
In a hybrid environment, one without the other simply starts to fall short.
