Microsoft Entra External ID vs. NordLayer

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

NordLayer has become an invaluable resource for our security posture and day-to-day activity. The primary use case is preventing staff members from accessing sensitive resources on an unencrypted connection, applying NordLayer and conditional access policies in congruency. The ability to create teams and assigned them to specific dedicated servers is also helpful and allows for further security segmentation

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

• Easy to use
• Simple user interface desgin
• Support many VPN protocol
• Fast and reliable connection

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

• The browser plugin needs some work, or some research about what browser/OS restrictions may limit its functionality. Ours does not work at all even after contacting support so we do not use it
• Toast/Windows notifications scheduled or deployed through admin center would be amazing. The ability to remind a user who has been disconnected for X hours would be a great feature

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

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

Incentivized

easy configuration and use case

• 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

• Improved sercurity
• Incresed productivity
• Performance impact

Incentivized