Microsoft Entra IDFormerly Microsoft Azure Active Directory
Overview
What is Microsoft Entra ID?
Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Microsoft Azure Active Directory or Azure AD) is a cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) solution supporting restricted access to applications with Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) built-in, single sign-on (SSO), B2B collaboration controls, self-service password, and…
Microsoft Entra ID: A hub of connecting SaaS applications
Microsoft Entra ID for business
Microsoft Entra ID - Must have tool for Large Enterprises
Easy to implement, Quick solution for Authentication Needs!
One of the best tool in Market for Authentication and Authorization
Entra ID review
An obvious choice for any large or small business firmly planted in the Microsoft ecosystem
An end-to-end user and identity management solution
Go to product for Identity and Access Management
General review of Azure Entra ID during ongoing cloud adoption
Fortifying Business Security with Seamless Authentication
Your one-stop identity shop!
Microsoft Entra ID
Entra ID by Microsoft: The Next Level of Authentication
How Microsoft Entra ID Differs From Its Competitors
Deployment
Multi-App Security
End User Experience
Deployment
Multi-App Security
End User Experience
Deployment
Multi-App Security
End User Experience
Deployment
Multi-App Security
End User Experience
Deployment
We have all of our user identities and some security groups synced to the cloud from an "on-prem" (azure VM) domain controller. …
Multi-App Security
End User Experience
For my purposes this is part of our logon design. …
Deployment
Multi-App Security
End User Experience
Deployment
Multi-App Security
End User Experience
Deployment
Multi-App Security
End User Experience
Deployment
We are moving all the resources in a phased manner to avoid any issues. The deployment is pretty easy as we have support from …
End User Experience
Deployment
Multi-App Security
End User Experience
Deployment
Multi-App Security
End User Experience
Awards
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Popular Features
- Multi-Factor Authentication (85)9.191%
- ID Management Single-Sign On (SSO) (85)9.090%
- ID-Management Access Control (84)8.888%
- Password Management (81)8.282%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Premium P1
$6.00
Premium P2
$9.00
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
AD FS to Microsoft Entra | How to migrate cloud apps
Microsoft Entra ID Beginner's Tutorial (Azure Active Directory)
Introducing Microsoft Entra
Features
Identity Management
Identity management software manages information about the identity of software users and controls access to corporate resources
- 8.8ID-Management Access Control(84) Ratings
Authorization or restriction of access to information depending on role
- 9ID Management Single-Sign On (SSO)(85) Ratings
The ability to login to the system once, gaining access to all systems without the need for logging in again
- 9.1Multi-Factor Authentication(85) Ratings
Using multiple, independent components to gain access
- 8.2Password Management(81) Ratings
Self-help capabilities the help users recover forgotten passwords, etc.
- 8.4Account Provisioning and De-provisioning(80) Ratings
Capabilities for creating user accounts based on roles, group memberships and business processes
- 8.2ID Management Workflow Automation(62) Ratings
Automated sequence of tasks to simplify processes
- 8.5ID Risk Management(64) Ratings
Identification, evaluation, and prioritization of risks with procedures to minimize, impacts of unplanned consequences
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
What is Microsoft Entra ID?
Microsoft Entra ID safeguards organizations with a cloud identity and access management solution that connects employees, customers, and partners to their apps, devices, and data. Features include:
- Secure adaptive access: Protects access to resources and data using strong authentication and risk-based adaptive access policies without compromising user experience.
- Seamless user experiences: Provides an easy sign-in experience across a multicloud environment to keep users productive, reduce time managing passwords, and increase productivity.
- Unified identity management: Manages identities and access to all applications in a central location, whether they’re in the cloud or on-premises, to improve visibility and control.
What is Microsoft Entra ID?
What is Conditional Access in Microsoft Entra ID?
What is Microsoft Entra ID Protection?
Microsoft Entra ID Features
Identity Management Features
- Supported: ID-Management Access Control
- Supported: ID Management Single-Sign On (SSO)
- Supported: Multi-Factor Authentication
- Supported: Password Management
- Supported: Account Provisioning and De-provisioning
- Supported: ID Management Workflow Automation
- Supported: ID Risk Management
Microsoft Entra ID Video
Microsoft Entra ID Competitors
- JumpCloud
- Okta
- One Login
Microsoft Entra ID Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Microsoft Entra ID Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(376)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 31)Microsoft Entra ID for business
- User and group management
- VM management and deployment
- SSO integration app store
- UI development
- Communication regarding name change
Entra ID review
- Syncing accounts
- Provisioning account
- Providing a hybrid envionment
- The interface could be better.
- Reporting is not very reliable and leaves off important information
- Consistency is lacking as Microsoft has changed Azure and Entra multiple times.
General review of Azure Entra ID during ongoing cloud adoption
- Authentication & Authorization
- Integration with cloud solutions
- Useful security standards around password complexity, etc...
- Fairly expensive
- Limited reporting
Currently we mainly integrate cloud solutions/applications with Microsoft Entra ID, while keeping our locally developped apps integrated with on-prem solutions.
Entra ID a simple overview
- User management
- Role Management
- Multi factor authentication
- They could stop changing things so often, hard to find things if you don't use them frequently.
- Occasional outages are annoying, and the alerts not terribly helpful sometimes. they tell you when something is down, but don't always notify when its back up.
- Things are deprecated fairly often, so don't get too invested in one way of doing things, you may have to change how things work in the future.
Not so much if you're just using it as an IDP for other services. It does try to take over somethings (like MX and DNS records) that you may want to keep having managed/hosted at 3rd parties.
Microsoft Entra ID for security and user comfort
In my org we use Microsoft Entra ID for security and ease of access for our users. First, we deployed self-service password reset to all of our users, which required they enter some additional information like personal contact info. This required some training on our part to let everyone know what was happening. Then, multi factor authentication and the Microsoft Authenticator provide protection. Once we had deployed MFA and had 100% adoption, we introduced phone sign-on so users did not need to use passwords when signing in.
We have also implemented conditional access to require MFA for all apps, and to block access if certain thresholds are met for failed sign-ins or unusual activity.
- Identity security
- Ease of access
- User risk management
- Conditional access
- Changes are not often clearly communicated unless you know where to look and have the correct email subscriptions.
- High learning curve.
Amazing identity management and security
- Assign users into groups dynamically based on user profile details.
- Secure authentication using easy app based MFA.
- User authentication intelligence that identifies unusual behavior and flags of blocks suspicious login attempts.
- Manage permissions for sensitive internal resources like the internet or project teams.
- Automatically assign licenses based on user properties or group membership
- Nesting of group membership does not allow email to be delivered to group members.
- User profile properties are somewhat rigid, creating custom attributes could be much easier and more functional.
- There are so many features navigation is somewhat challenging to remember if you are not a daily user.
Creating a secure environment where identify and access are highly secure and authenticated is very easy to manage and user.
It also allows for various levels of administrative access. You can give certain people access to user administration without having to give them access to other administrative functions.
In my experience, there really isn’t a size or scope of company that could not benefit from Microsoft Entra ID.
Excellent cloud identity provider!
- Single Sign On.
- Security (Multifactor authentication).
- User management.
- The Entra ID interface has numerous options. It is sometimes easy to get lost looking for something.
- The recent name change from Azure has confused some of our users, thinking they were logging into the wrong portal. This generated numerous calls to our help desk.
- MS will change the locations of things inside their interface at will. Sometimes, they notify you beforehand, and others do not.
Microsoft Entra ID Review
- Logging when there's enough storage. So recent logging, there's good conditional access policies. And I mean SSO MFAs pretty decent, so good I guess particularly well. And then on the SSO side, integration with apps and whatnot out there on the web does it very well. Obviously it's Microsoft
- There's a lot of stuff that's kind of cobbled together. It's hard to find dashboards, it's hard to find configuration settings because they're not always in the same spot or they're renamed, the look and feel of reports, analysis tools, configurations can vary wildly from area to area. So there's a lot of cohesion that needs to be done for it to really be better.
Microsoft Entra ID is a great identity solution.
- Foundation for O365.
- Mechanism for modern authentication (SSO, SAML, OAuth, OIDC).
- Feature-rich with controls like Conditional Access to enforce MFA and other access restrictions to company applications.
- I would like to see more low-code automation options.
- Default options need to be set more restrictive to prevent accidentally relaxed security settings.
- I would like to see more streamlined configuration pages. Many similar or related settings are scattered across different pages.
Microsoft Entra ID Review
- Managing Users
- Managing groups
- Setting up multi factor Authentication
- Setting up B2B cross tenant
- None
One identity (aka Microsoft Entra ID)
- Multi-factor authentication integration
- Active Directory federation services works very well with on-prem AD
- Integrated very well with other Microsoft tools (Office 365, Outlook, SharePoint, etc.)
- Organization of the homepage/portal seems to change a lot
- Security reporting could be setup to be more intuitive
- The application proxy setup can be easier to setup and understand
We also use the federation services a tremendous amount to synchronize with our on-prem environment.
Some of the application proxy setups don't work very well with some of our internal applications and information to help troubleshoot is difficult to find.
Azure Active Directory = Microsoft Entra ID
- Microsoft Entra integrates and functions very well with other applications/tools since it was developed by Microsoft.
- Entra provides us the abilities to implement conditional access policies to require additional verifications (or lack thereof if needed) before granting access to a resource.
- The ability to implement passwordless logins via Windows Hello or Authenticator sign-ins is extremely useful as companies transition to Zero Trust
- Sometimes navigation in Entra ID can be challenging because (due to all the features) options are often buried deep in the site. This can slow up technicians until they get familiar with exactly what section they need to navigate to in order to perform a specific function/task.
- To further expand on the above statement, Microsoft has a history of moving and/or renaming functions and products so it can be a challenge to find features at times.
- Due to the sheer amount of features that Entra ID offers, it has a very steep learning curve to fully understand everything it can do....and how to use/configure each function.
Microsoft Azure Active Directory
- SSO integration
- Device management
- User management
- MFA setup
- Affordable security plans
- integrates with third-party authentication tools like OKTA and ping. This brings MFA functionality to your organization. The integration is quite simple to do.
- This can be used to control access to your networking devices like your on-premise routers and switches if needed.
- The access control policies are very vast. So you can set each department in your organization to each access control policy and their access to resources will be controlled.
- Documentation - Microsoft really needs to work on their documentation when it comes to doing more complicated tasks like working with API. The official documentation often gets us confused as to how to do certain tasks. We sometimes ended up spending hours trying to figure out how certain tasks are completed.
- No jammed down version - This is the go-to tool if you are invested in a lot of cloud-based solutions and if you have a lot of resources that need authentication. But for smaller organizations, Microsoft needs to bring packages with smaller features for SMBs with lower rates so that SMBs can come on board.
Microsoft Azure Active Directory
- Basic user management with full metadata
- Single Sign On
- Multi factor authentication
- Some of the most desirable advanced features are seemingly only available in bundles
- licensing is confusing
- The speed of evolution has made this a good suite of services, but it is exhausting to keep up with the rate of change.
The simplicity of management using Microsoft Azure Active Directory
- We departmentalize our users by schools
- We departmentatize our users by departments
- We use this to keep up with what rights we allow specific users
- We have been active directory users for many years and do appreciate the ease of functionality
- We use FinPlus as our financial system to manage our employees but we have to manually move employees in AD
Medium Maturity product that needs to evolve
- SSO authentication for multiple applications
- Data access policies
- Built in replication and redundancy across Domain Controllers
- MFA capabilities can be further improved
- License costs are high
- Implementation time is long with limited integrator expertise available
- Support from Microsoft technical team
A self-service portal for end-users is an important improvement. An enterprise that requires self-service capabilities to be cautious
Microsoft Azure Active Directory Review
- Managing users
- Managing machines
- Security groups
- Customization (user defined fields)
- A better UI
- Better online integration
way AD is built, it’s simple and allows us to accomplish what we need in a very simple and efficient way.
Managing users and machines are simply way easier with Microsoft Azure Active Directory.
Works well if you're already committed to Microsoft
- Easy management of groups and user assignments
- Integration with web applications using oauth
- Easily extends existing on premise AD
- The UI can be cumbersome to use - bulk edits for instance are best handled using powershell.
- Documentation can be hard to find when integrating AD into web apps
- Some settings in AD can be confusing with no obvious explanation - for instance, setting up custom scopes for an application is confusing.
- UI - The user interface for configuring items within Azure AD is great.
- CLI - Interacting with the Azure CLI for Azure AD is the same great well documented experience as other interactions with the Azure CLI. Functionality is solid, documentation is great to explain different use cases with the CLI, and overall the ease of use is fantastic.
- Configuration Documentation: There's evidently been changes to Azure AD improving the platform but in making these changes it's incredibly difficult to find solid step by step instructions to implement Azure AD for given SaaS apps for example. This isn't necessarily Microsoft's fault, as documentation drift happens everywhere, but even within Microsoft's own documentation there are discrepancies. It makes setting up AAD on an application potentially more difficult than it needs to be.
- Multi Account Difficulties: If you have multiple accounts tied to AAD (like a school account and a work account for example) it's incredibly difficult to sign in on both. Heaven help you if you forget to open a private browsing tab to sign in to the different account. You'll spend a non-zero amount of time trying to sign back in to your other account.
Tight integration, simple management and a feature-rich experience is what AzureAD promises and delivers
AzureAD was definately the optimial option, it allowed us to unify our IT administration experience through tightly integrated capabilities, and simplified synchronization of objects from On-Premises Active Directory, additionally, most of our online services for internal users are on Microsoft 365, in such scenarios, AzureAD is absolutly the best choice for our organization.
It scaled nicely as the company grows, and offers RBAC, Conditional Access and Privileged Identity Management, it also supports most of the common authentication scenarios and protocols that we require in our business, we are very much satisfied with how AzureAD works and it is definately a reliable and flexible IAM solution.
- Conditional Access in AzureAD is great and works very well
- Integration with Intune, Microsoft 365 and other Microsoft Cloud Services is unmatching
- Simple user management from the Portal
- Sign-ins behavioral monitoring and user risk detection is a top security need
- Many features are added every now and then and its relatively easy to enable them organization-wide
- The Multi-Factor Authentication Portal still uses the old Azure Interface that is over 7 years old, it's exceedingly difficult to manage MFA enablement for substantial number of users
- Some limitations in the portal such as user retrieval is limited, making selecting multiple objects difficult
- The AzureAD Sync client is particularly useful but requires advanced technical skills to troubleshoot if anything goes wrong
- Certain security features which I believe are considered essential are only part of the Premium 2 license, such as Risk Detection and Investigation, Microsoft should try to make Plans more tailored into other features (For example limit on objects, app registration, branding, and make security features an essential part of any AzureAD Plan.
- Active Directory as your on-premises domain service
- Plan to use a cloud-based productivity service such as Microsoft 365
- Have any Azure-resources
- Use Microsoft Teams
- Need to have a familiar interface with familiar tools and extensive documentation
- Want to reduce the number of IAM Solutions you are using
However, if you plan to use cloud services from other providers such as Google, then you might consider other options or preferrably use Google Cloud Directory for that matter, AzureAD is tailored for businesses who have capitialized many of their IT Investments in the Microsoft Ecosystem and therefore, serves them the most.
Microsoft Azure AD integration with Business Central
- The integration with other Microsoft products
- Multi-factor authentication
- Conditional access
- Simplify complexity - Azure AD is rich of features, but that also makes it very complex
- Management
Azure AD Review for Medium Enterprise
- Enhanced our end-user experience.
- Secure access for users.
- Integration with other Microsoft products.
- Users require some training.
- The UI can be more intuitive.
- The UI can use modern layout.
You will be hard pressed to find a better cloud identity provider than Microsoft Azure Active Directory
- Conditional Access -- this is one of the biggest tools that any admin needs when it comes to securing when, where, and how users are accessing information. Especially if the information contains sensitive data types.
- Multi-factor Authentication -- we have all our employees configured for MFA. This is incredibly easy to configure with Azure, as well as defining when MFA should be used through Conditional Access.
- Audit Logs -- being able to track and identify a user's activity is pretty critical, especially when in incident response mode.
- Complexity --Microsoft Azure Active Directory isn't exactly for the faint of heart.
- Management -- some bulk management tasks need to be run through PowerShell...if you don't know PowerShell (and you should) then this could be problematic.
- Needs assessment -- the licensing structure for Azure AD might be difficult to understand given the breadth of features available. For example, Azure Active Directory P1 will differ from Azure Active Directory P2, but what does that mean and is it applicable to your organization? Is it necessary to have P2 over P1 to accomplish your business goals?
The reality is that Microsoft Azure Active Directory is one part of a suite of products and it is sometimes hard to look at it without understanding how it interacts with the other tools in the suite. If we take this into consideration, then Microsoft Azure Active Directory is the backbone for providing a cloud-based user identity and security solution that will be applicable under any circumstance.
Microsoft Azure Active Directory is a sure solution
We are using Microsoft Azure Active Directory for basic operations:
- Single sign-on, enabling access to apps from anywhere
- Conditional access and multi-factor authentication to help protect and govern access over the users
- Integrating identities with other apps and authenticating for the work system
- Single identity platform to engage with internal and external users more securely
- Identity governance can free up IT resources by automating periodic supervisory reviews
- Integrates seamlessly with third-party MFA and MDM providers
- User interface can be improved; can be more user friendly
- It is not flexible or customizable for specific needs. It only manages Microsoft accounts in the same domain.
- Lower intrinsic value for customers not already invested in other Microsoft cloud services
Some specific scenarios where Microsoft Azure AD will be well suited are
- If your organization has users who are geographically dispersed and you want to implement a centralized security and access system for them.
- If the client or organization is heavily invested in Microsoft eco-system for other needs, Microsoft Azure Active Directory is the way to go
- If the organization is not invested in the Microsoft ecosystem.
- If you want an intuitive implementation process.
- If you have fewer than 50 users.