One of the features of Microsoft Entra ID that is never really spoken about is password protection. We see it is a very easy implementation that provides high value from a customer standpoint. If you are still on that passwordless journey and you are heavily reliant on passwords, password protection within Microsoft Entra ID gives you that extra added protection to ensure your weak passwords are eliminated from your environment. The implementation of Microsoft Entra ID significantly improves our security and reduces the attack surface from an application standpoint. That is the plane which enforces MFA and all that. Even dynamic risk factors, such as if the user is traveling from different locations or if we see a bad actor signing into their account from a different location, or if the account has been compromised, can be remediated without requiring a human in the loop. It actually can remediate those identity attacks, thereby reducing our admins' administrative efforts to chase down users and get the risk remediated. The remediation aspect of Conditional Access and risk-based Conditional Access really improves the security and reduces the attack surface for our organization. A critical control plane for us is Conditional Access, which is also the zero trust control plane. Those are the conditions we define, whether internal or external networks; any access goes through these checks and needs to be verified and trusted but still needs to be validated. Whether it is our MFA policy, domain join requirements, or Intune compliance requirements, those conditions help us enforce zero trust principles into reality. The implementation of Microsoft Entra ID has benefited our organization by providing a central plane for all our applications to utilize single sign-on. This results in a seamless experience for our users since they do not have to remember multiple usernames and passwords; it ensures a single plane of access. From a security perspective, because it is a single plane, every application communicates with Microsoft Entra ID, allowing us to enforce multi-factor authentication across almost all applications that require access. Additionally, it significantly reduces our attack surface and provides high security benefits using built-in automations.
