Azure Active Directory External Identities

Azure Active Directory External Identities

Score 8.4 out of 10
Azure Active Directory External Identities

Overview

What is Azure Active Directory External Identities?

Azure Active Directory B2C (alternately, Azure Active Directory External Identities) provides business-to-customer identity as a service. Customers can use their preferred social, enterprise, or local account identities to get single sign-on access to applications and APIs.
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Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Verified User
Technician in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 51-200 employees
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Electrical & Electronic Manufacturing Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Pricing

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Premium P1 (for More than 50,000 MAU)

$0.00325

Cloud
per month per active users

Premium P2 (for More than 50,000 MAU)

$0.01625

Cloud
per month per active users

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://azure.microsoft.com/en…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting / Integration Services
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Product Details

What is Azure Active Directory External Identities?

Azure AD B2C (or Azure Active Directory External Identities) is a customer identity access management (CIAM) solution
The solution is capable of supporting millions of users and billions of authentications per day. It takes care of the scaling and safety of the authentication platform, monitoring, and automatically handling threats like denial-of-service, password spray, or brute force attacks. Azure AD B2C is a separate service from Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). It is built on the same technology as Azure AD but for a different purpose. It allows businesses to build customer facing applications, and then allow anyone to sign up into those applications with no restrictions on user account.

Who uses Azure AD B2C?
Any business or individual who wishes to authenticate end users to their web/mobile applications using a white-label authentication solution. Apart from authentication, Azure AD B2C service is used for authorization such as access to API resources by authenticated users. Azure AD B2C is meant to be used by IT administrators and developers.

Custom-branded identity solution
Azure AD B2C is a white-label authentication solution. The user experience can be customized with a brand so that it blends with web and mobile applications. Pages displayed by Azure AD B2C when users sign up, sign in, and modify their profile information can also be customized. Customize the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in user journeys so that the Azure AD B2C experience looks and feels like it's a native part of the application.

Single sign-on access with a user-provided identity
Azure AD B2C uses standards-based authentication protocols including OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). It integrates with most modern applications and commercial off-the-shelf software.

Integrate with external user stores
Azure AD B2C provides a directory that can hold 100 custom attributes per user. However, the solution can be integrated with external systems. For example, use Azure AD B2C for authentication, but delegate to an external customer relationship management (CRM) or customer loyalty database as the source of truth for customer data.

Another external user store scenario is to have Azure AD B2C handle the authentication for an application, but integrate with an external system that stores user profile or personal data. For example, to satisfy data residency requirements like regional or on-premises data storage policies. However, Azure AD B2C service itself is worldwide via the Azure public cloud.

Progressive profiling
Another user journey option includes progressive profiling. Progressive profiling allows customers to coomplete their first transaction by collecting a minimal amount of information. Then, gradually collect more profile data from the customer on future sign-ins.

Third-party identity verification and proofing
Azure AD B2C can be used to facilitate identity verification and proofing by collecting user data, then passing it to a third-party system to perform validation, trust scoring, and approval for user account creation.

Azure Active Directory External Identities Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

 (50)

Reviews

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January 25, 2023

Great cloud solution for companies already using other MS Azure services.

Verified User
Technician in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 51-200 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Azure AD B2C solution for one of our clients who need to authenticate end users to their mobile application and support their backbone as IT admins. It helped us to address and facilitate identity verification by gathering user data. Moreover, the progressive profiling feature helped their customers to complete their first transaction quickly and efficiently.
Pros and Cons
  • Single sign-on access with a user-provided identity.
  • Progressive profiling.
  • Authenticate individual customers.
  • Confusing pricing.
  • Complexity.
  • Interface
Likelihood to Recommend
The cloud-based aspect is well suited for our client as they also switched to MS365 and Azure platforms from the On-site infrastructure of their IT. For companies that are still using on-premise IT infrastructure, it may not be the best solution due to the complexity of the user interface, and the learning curve can be challenging for this type of client.
Most Important Features
  • Seamless and easy integration with other Microsoft platforms.
  • Being a cloud based solution.
  • Strong authentication for clients using their preferred identity provider.
Return on Investment
  • 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.
Other Software Used
October 04, 2022

Scalable and easy to implement solution with great visibility

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Electrical & Electronic Manufacturing Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use the Azure Active Directory B2C service to authorize access to our own custom web applications via API access. It is mainly used for authentication, control and monitoring of external users such as developers, and also for security reasons to defend against, for example, Denial of service, password hashing or brute force attacks.
Pros and Cons
  • authentication
  • authorization
  • monitoring access
  • Azure AD Application Proxy
  • inability to nest groups
  • no customized emails
Likelihood to Recommend
It is not easy to calculate the actual ROI due to the difficult quantification of all factors, but it certainly contributed a lot in protecting, monitoring and controlling access to our system. It also made it much easier to detect vulnerable external users with simple and "easy to hack" passwords they use on multiple apps.
Most Important Features
  • security
  • user control
  • monitoring access
Return on Investment
  • less vulnerable
  • better security
  • bigger overall control
Other Software Used
September 21, 2022

Azure Active Directory B2C greatly connects with its peoples world

Verified User
Consultant in Product Management
Information Technology & Services Company, 51-200 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
It help us to keep track of our teams groups and manage the user roles very easily. This also makes it easy to manage our sign in's with a nice overview chart of your monthly activity. There are a lot of apps and add-ins that work with this service. It works well with Microsoft Dynamics. There are a lot of tutorials that walk you through setting up and using this product. It's really a great turn-key system that is very secure and user friendly.
Pros and Cons
  • Single sign-on simplifies access to your apps from anywhere
  • Strong authentication for your customers using their preferred identity provider.
  • Integrating with social accounts such as Facebook or Google+
  • The Cost, This service is available on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) basis.
  • Customization features
Likelihood to Recommend
Azure Active Directory has so many features. I love that with the B2C Collaboration it easily let’s you smoothly operate between personal and business security. You can also expand or contract that instance as you wish thereby increasing performance or decreasing cost based on the demand time to time. I wish the product had more customizations for collaborations such as multimedia integration/authenticate users for Microsoft 365
Most Important Features
  • scopes to gather more information about consumers from various social identity providers
  • Ability of Azure AD B2C to work with CRM systems such as Microsoft Dynamics
  • Option to localize the UI pages and multi language support
Return on Investment
  • Good/Positive impact
  • increases productivity
  • Helps to maintain security and traffic of the users
Alternatives Considered
I really enjoy how simple it is to connect this Active Directory with other Microsoft Products to collaborate with colleagues and clients.
Other Software Used
September 14, 2022

Cloud based - Business to Consumer

CR
Cj Rosenstiel
IT Apps Programmer Sr
Progressive (Insurance, 5001-10,000 employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Azure Active Directory B2C allows users to sign into parts of our systems using multifactor authentication while still accessing the parts that do not need the added protection. The predefined user flows help create user experiences and access quickly, while the custom policies are for a more robust scenario. Both are unique and tailored to our needs.
Pros and Cons
  • User flows
  • MFA
  • User interface
  • Custom policies options
  • integrating
Likelihood to Recommend
Azure Active Directory B2C is well suited for businesses that require different levels of protection. You can use Azure Active Directory B2C for both signings into an application and added security once signed in. You can edit profiles, set up workflows, customize group policies, as well as provides several different verification methods such as email, phone call, SMS, or authenticator app.
Most Important Features
  • One stop shop
  • Easy access
  • multiple options
Return on Investment
  • Stronger security
  • Conditional Access
Alternatives Considered
Each one of these alternatives has pros and cons. PingOne from Ping Identity states they "help deliver the secure and seamless customer experience to win battles for customer acquisition, retention, revenue, loyalty, and trust." While that may be the case, they did not fit our needs. We have a complex system and it did not seem to fit into our business.
Other Software Used
February 25, 2022

Awesome product, lousy marketing -- it's Azure's best-kept secret!

Lars Kemmann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Lars Kemmann
Principal Architect
Netrix LLC (Information Technology and Services, 501-1000 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Azure Active Directory B2C is our go-to platform for customer identity and access management (CIAM) needs, both for our internally-developed applications and products as well as for our clients' customer-facing applications. Despite the name, Azure Active Directory B2C excels at both business-to-consumer and business-to-business ("B2B") functionality; I often explain to people that "B2C" should be read as "business-to-customer." We have used Azure Active Directory B2C for everything from prototype apps and small business scenarios to very large enterprises with millions of user accounts.
Pros and Cons
  • Customer identity
  • User experience customization
  • Integration and configuration
  • Security
  • Availability/reliability
  • Troubleshooting diagnostic logs effectively requires VS Code
  • Group and role management requires additional effort
  • The programming model (XML) could use some developer experience love
Likelihood to Recommend
Azure Active Directory B2C is sufficiently flexible and configurable that it can work in just about any customer identity and access management (CIAM) scenario. Its pricing model also scales well for both small businesses (for whom it's almost always free) and very large enterprises (who can optimize the cost of multifactor authentication at scale by using the Premium P2 SKU). Azure Active Directory B2C is particularly useful in scenarios where you want to integrate multitenant (corporate) Azure AD apps, for single sign-on from your AAD customers, with other accounts for your non-AAD customers.

The only technical limitation we've encountered over the years is that, natively, Azure Active Directory B2C does not support device "fingerprinting"; however, this functionality can be added (if needed) through Microsoft's Fraud Prevention service or other third-party solutions.
Most Important Features
  • Configurability
  • Integration with Azure
  • Value
  • Security
  • Reliability
Return on Investment
  • Time to market for our products significantly reduced
  • Optimized our total cost of ownership for providing subscription SaaS solutions
  • Streamlined maintainability of solutions
Alternatives Considered
The best selling points for Azure Active Directory B2C that stand out from the competition are:
  • Pricing, both at small and very large scale (and in between), is hard to beat
  • The seamless integration with Azure should make Azure Active Directory B2C the first choice of CIAM platform for anyone building on Azure
  • Full compatibility with Azure AD's audit log format means Azure Active Directory B2C can be easily integrated into your SIEM tooling
Other Software Used
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