Fischer Identity as a Service vs. Microsoft Entra External ID

Fischer is well suited for the use case scenarios where an institution has not previously used any identity management and needs to quickly provide services to meet regulatory or other deadlines. It also works well when you can implement in smaller batches of user accounts and grow over time. We have found it less appropriate for cases where we have needed to set up on-off temporary or special access. Fischer has worked with us on out-of-band provisioning but we had to pay for extra Fischer professional services to make that work.

Incentivized

In our organisation we use Microsoft Entra External ID primarily to enable non-attenders to remotely login to our tenant and access pre-prepared educational resources. As well as access to tutors, pupils can also communicate with centralised staff who can support them to gain an education. Utilising our external tenant configuration we can develop and deploy our own in house apps to unpin this support intervention.

Incentivized

• Integration with ERP
• Integration with Account Directory
• Integration with Office 365
• Password Reset Portal

Incentivized

• One of the things that Microsoft Entra External ID does really well is creating user logins, accounts and profile. It is very easy to create them, manage them and delete them. It is fast and reliant.
• Limit access or authorization feature. We can allow different levels of authorization and access. So that not all the employees would have access to all the data. Only some relaible employees would have access and power to change anything.
• Mutli factor authentication feature is also a really good feature to secure data. Even overseas vendors need MFS to login which gives double protection to our data.

Incentivized

• Reducing the frequency (twice a month) of scheduled outages. But I believe they are making progress toward developing a more robust cloud infrastructure that will eliminate the need for such frequent downtimes.
• There are some less than intuitive administration tools, which could be improved. Fisher is always willing to help us when we don't understand the proper way to configure using the tools.
• I would like a streamlined way to move changes from our test environment into our production (live) environment instead of having to duplicate the effort.

Incentivized

• Troubleshooting diagnostic logs effectively requires VS Code
• Group and role management requires additional effort
• The programming model (XML) could use some developer experience love

Incentivized

Microsoft Entra External ID is an all round solid product, and certainly delivers the solution to our needs well. Through use we found that Pupil's become 'experts in avoidance', if they can forget their login details or indeed their device used for MFA, they will and then use that as the excuse for not accessing/completing their assignments. If more MFA options were available (such as delegated MFA) this would really help iron out our entire end user experiences

Incentivized

It does deliver as advertised, provided you do your homework and understand the expected outcome before going live. Poor planning can turn the project into a nightmare. It can save the company a good deal of man hours and money by bringing about identity management automation, a self-service portal, and customizable email notifications for all of the identity owners and other stakeholders. For example, you can inform your HR team upon successful account creation and disablement. You can proactively reach out to users informing them about their account extirpation status, etc.

Incentivized

I really enjoy how simple it is to connect this Active Directory with other Microsoft Products to collaborate with colleagues and clients.

Incentivized

• Fischer has had a positive impact by providing self-serve identity and password management tools that our constituents can use at their convience, not tied to our operational hours.
• Fisher Identity as a Service has been a significant cost, but it is anticipated that it saves our students significant time and effort that they can better dedicate to their academic pursuits.
• Negative initial reaction--as this was a new way of doing things, there was a period of confusion among our college constituent that required additional communication and instruction

Incentivized

• Having monthly active users billing was cost-effective.
• Helped with the IT support that was already managing the Azure platform of the company; this helped to manage the costs better and optimize them.

Incentivized