Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

Azure AD manages the identities of all our employees. 

Azure AD allowed us to get rid of servers and other hardware that run at our offices. We moved everything to the cloud. Once we set up roles and permissions, it's only a matter of adding people and removing people from different groups and letting permissions flow through. 

It also saved us some money. Our IT group is tiny, so any automation we can do is valuable. We haven't had to grow the team beyond three. The employee reaction to Microsoft Entra has been positive. People like to have a single credential for accessing all our Microsoft and non-Microsoft apps.

I like Azure AD's single sign-on and identity federation features. It allows us to issue a single credential to every employee and not worry about managing a lot of passwords. Microsoft Entra provides a single pane of glass for managing user access, and we're pleased with it.

Entra's conditional access feature enables us to set policies up based on the location and risk score of the account and the device they use to access the network. Permission management lets us assign roles for various Azure functions based on functions people perform in the company. It helps us bundle access to different things by associating it with a given role at the company.

I would like to see a better delegation of access. For instance, we want to allow different groups within the company to manage different elements of Azure AD, but I need more granularity in delegating access.

We've been using Azure AD for 10 years.

I rate Azure AD nine out of ten for stability. They've had issues in the past, but it's been quite some time. It has been nearly two years since the last availability problem.

We only have 100 employees at the company, so we're nowhere near the maximum limits. I know of a massive company that adopted Azure AD. I imagine it's scalable well beyond the size of our company.

The support is decent. I always manage to find what I'm looking for. If it's not in the documentation, there are lots of blog posts that third parties have written, and I always seem to find what I need. I rate Microsoft support nine out of ten. 

Positive

We used the on-premises version of Active Directory, but we switched to the cloud to get rid of all of our hardware. We don't run any servers in the officer anymore. 

Setting up Azure AD was straightforward. It's all delivered online, so it's only a matter of filling in the parameters for our organization. After that point, it scales easily.

There's no traditional maintenance. We have to perform audits on accounts to ensure that people and permissions are still online. There isn't product or data maintenance. 

Azure AD is essential to how the business runs. We're only investing more in the whole Microsoft Suite.

We're a Microsoft partner, so we get partner benefits. We pay almost nothing, and it's massively valuable to us.

We didn't look at anything else because we're committed to Office 365, and we need to be on Active Directory for Office 365. It's a well-known, trusted solution so we never did an analysis of alternatives.

I rate Azure Active Directory nine out of ten. I'm sure there are some areas for improvement, but it's extremely valuable to us and the way that we operate.

Since we began to use Active Directory, I've learned a lot about industry best practices, particularly digital identity and its role in zero trust. By using a major mainstream identity provider, we're able to move toward the whole zero-trust model that's popular right now.

If you implement Azure AD, you need to consider the third-party apps you want to integrate. If they support competitors like Okta, Ping, and SailPoint, then they will almost certainly support Azure AD legacy applications. However, older software applications don't integrate well with Azure AD. 

We're using Azure Active Directory to get authentication from Office 365, and along with this, we're using it for infrastructure-as-a-service authentication. For all the virtual machines hosted on Azure right now, we're getting authentication from Azure Active Directory.

In addition to these, we're using some other SaaS or software-as-a-service products such as SAP Ariba and SAP SuccessFactors. For these specific products also, I have integrated single sign-on via Azure Active Directory.

We're also using e-procurement solutions such as Tejari and SAP Ariba. To get authentication of my guest users, who are my partners, vendors, or external collaborators, we create their guest accounts on Azure Active Directory. They come into our applications through that. We get a secure channel to provide access to the external parties on our tenant through Azure Active Directory. These are the basic use cases of Azure Active Directory.

After moving to Azure Active Directory, life becomes very easy, not only for the administrator and IT people but for the end-users as well. They've now got a single sign-on. Previously, our end-users had to remember multiple account IDs and passwords, and they had to enter the relevant account ID and password for each application, whereas now, they have a single identity across all the applications provisioned in our landscape.

It's helpful for security and compliance. Security is a big concern right now, and we're very sensitive about it. I am from the Oil and Gas sector, and this is something that's very critical for us. Additionally, we have external contributors, such as partners, vendors, and technical consultants, who need access to our resources from outside the organization. Azure Active Directory provides some very good features for that such as guest user access and limited user access. 

It has default integration with all Microsoft products such as SharePoint, Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and obviously, the infrastructure as the service landscape of Azure. This integration is surely amazing.

Conditional access is amazing. I have a success story to share for the conditional access feature. About six or seven years ago, we identified a cyber attack that was coming from certain IPs from Nigeria on our tenant, and through that, some of our users were compromised. We blocked all Nigerian IPs using Azure conditional access and saved our users. It was something amazing and life-saving for us. 

The conditional access feature complements the zero-trust strategy. It makes our environment more secure. It makes our environment more reliable as far as the whole security landscape is concerned.

We use Microsoft Endpoint Manager. Initially, we were not using it, but later on, we started to use Microsoft Endpoint, which was previously known as Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection. Implementing secure policies of Microsoft Endpoint, advanced threat protection, and conditional access provides us with a very safe and kind of sandbox environment. This combination protects us from those who are accessing our environment from unpatched devices, pirated applications, and applications with security loopholes.

We're also using Microsoft Intune to save our corporate devices and provide a secure zone for our users to access corporate resources and applications.

Personally, I'm a great fan of Azure Active Directory due to the security and compliance features that are there in the classic or default Azure Active Directory. 

The conditional access feature is absolutely great through which we provide access to users on the basis of a certain device, a certain geographical location, a certain set of IPs, or any other criteria that we can define via a set of rules. 

The auditing of Azure Active Directory is fantastic, and its integration with Cloud App Security is something amazing because we can get complete visibility of our environment through Cloud App Security. It also helps us a lot with our yearly audits and monthly reporting.

There is a lot of room for improvement in terms of its integration with the local Active Directory. There are some gaps in terms of the local Active Directory through which Microsoft is syncing our environment from our data center. There should be the availability of custom attributes on Azure Active Directory. In addition, there should be the availability of security groups and distribution groups that are residing on the local Active Directory. Currently, they are not replicated on Azure Active Directory by default.

There should also be a provision for Azure Active Directory to support custom-built applications. 

I've been using this solution for the last 12 years.

It's very stable.

It's very scalable. It's being used in companies with 64 users as well as in companies with 16,000 users. For both companies, it's working perfectly. It's a very good product.

My environment is based on multiple things. We're using Office 365 in the software-as-a-service mode. We're using Azure infrastructure in the infrastructure-as-a-service mode. We have integrated our Azure Active Directory with multiple third-party solutions such as Oracle Aconex, SAP S4HANA, SAP Ariba, SAP SuccessFactors, and Tejari. Along with this, we're providing authentication services to our third-party or external vendors, contractors, and guest users through Azure Active Directory. It's in hybrid mode. It's in the private cloud, software-as-a-service, and infrastructure-as-a-service environments. There are multiple environments.

Back in 2010 or 2011, when Microsoft launched it initially, it was very good, but since COVID or post-COVID, the quality has reduced significantly. Before COVID, it was very good. We would normally get very good engineers on call. We got support from the European zones, but since COVID, their support services have been significantly compromised. The quality of engineers or the quality of SLAs is not up to the mark. 

I was one of the people here in Pakistan who started the cloud. Microsoft has published three case studies of mine on the cloud during the last ten years. Over the years, I've seen that the overall support model of Microsoft Cloud has been compromised. I'd rate their support a six out of ten. 

Positive

We were using the local Active Directory previously. From day one, we've been die-hard fans of Active Directory. Until 2011 or 2012, we used the local Active Directory that was hosted in my own data center, and now, because we're in a hybrid environment, we're managing local Active Directory, and we're managing Azure Active Directory. We're managing both.

We got Azure Active Directory because we moved to Office 365, public cloud, infrastructure as a service, and software as a service. We needed a single sign-on and integration with some third-party cloud products such as SAP Ariba, SAP SuccessFactors, and Tejari. 

Last month, we did the very first integration in Pakistan with Oracle Aconex. It's one of the biggest engineering document management suites in the world. We integrated Azure Active Directory with EDMS, which was really commendable. It was something that was done for the first time in Pakistan.

We're using Azure Active Directory with Office 365, which is a public cloud. The same Azure Active Directory is integrated with Azure infrastructure's private cloud, so the same Active Directory is serving in multiple scenarios. Through the same Azure Active Directory, we have integrated with the custom applications that are hosted on other public clouds such as Oracle Aconex, SAP S4HANA, SAP Ariba, SAP SuccessFactors, and Tejari. So, we're using it in the hybrid mode to sync our local Active Directory. From that hybrid mode, it's providing authentication to the users for Office 365 and it's providing services for the users who are using Windows virtual desktop. On the other side, for the third party, we're also using Azure Active Directory.

I deployed it myself. The initial setup was complex when we were implementing it around twelve years ago, but now, it's very simple. When we started this journey, it took us six months to integrate our local Active Directory with Azure Active Directory. We worked with three different partners. Two of them failed, and then Microsoft Pakistan got involved with us. Through their Dubai-based partner, we successfully integrated our Azure Active Directory with our local, on-premises Active Directory. We got success with the third partner, but overall, it took us six months. Nowadays, the hybrid configuration and the integration of Azure Active Directory with the local Active Directory is a piece of cake.

In terms of maintenance, because it's software as a service, Microsoft is managing it for us. We don't take any backup, etc. It's just managed by Microsoft.

We got a very good ROI when we compare it with what we were using around ten years ago. It's a much improved and cost-efficient product in terms of cloud provision.

It's pretty good. We're using the native features. It's bundled with our Office 365 licenses. We aren't paying anything extra for Azure Active Directory. It's pretty good for us because it's complementary to Office 365. We're only paying for Office 365.

We checked Google Suite. We checked its identity mechanism, but it was not as per our requirements.

It's a very good product. It's a stable product. I'd highly recommend it.

Overall, I'd rate Azure Active Directory a nine out of ten.

We use it as the Active Directory on the cloud. We have the systems on-premises and on the cloud. We connect the AD data to Azure. We have a single sign-on service on multi-cloud. We use the single sign-on feature on, for example, AWS.

In terms of the version, we use it as a service, and it is always updated to the latest version. 

Microsoft Entra ID helps to synchronize information from on-premise Active Directory. There are security features such as multifactor authentication. We can also use a single sign-on to connect with the other application on the cloud. 

It helps our admins to have more security. It is helpful for authentication methods, log checking, and audit trails in case of security concerns. However, it has not saved them time.

Microsoft Entra ID has not helped to save our organization money, but it helps to improve security.

The security features, multi-factor authentication, and service management features are valuable.

Microsoft Entra ID provides a single pane of glass for managing user access. Its menus are properly categorized, and they make it easy to use for our work and processes.

One thing that they need to improve is the cost. It already has a lot of features, but more protection of the identity would be beneficial for customers.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. In our environment, we mostly have Microsoft solutions such as Microsoft 365, email, OneDrive, SharePoint, Power Apps, etc. Entra ID is deployed across multiple locations for multiple users. We have a Microsoft 365 license for all employees. We have two admins who take care of configuration and monitoring for security and data loss prevention. 

We have plans to increase its usage.

I have not contacted their support.

We did not use any other similar solution previously.

I was not involved in its deployment. 

It is costly.

I would recommend this solution to others. Overall, I would rate Microsoft Entra ID an eight out of ten.

We sync up our on-premise Active Directory with Azure AD and use it for app registration. All of our cloud-based DevOps activities use Azure Active Directory.

Azure Active Directory has many automation capabilities, and you can apply policies on top. You can do a lot of things with these combinations and integrate other tools like PingFederate. We've likely saved some money, but I don't know how much. 

The solution has made our environment more controlled and robust. At the same time, functions become more challenging for users when you add more controls and multi-factor authentication. However, these measures are essential when you're dealing with a complex environment that crosses multiple regions and cloud platforms. 

I like Azure Active Directory's integration with GT Nexus, and it improves our overall security. Azure AD enables us to manage user access from a single pane of glass. We use single sign-on and multifactor authentication. Teams are required to have Authenticator downloaded on their devices. 

We use Azure AD's conditional access feature to fine-tune access controls and implement a zero-trust policy using authentication tokens. The calling application needs to verify those tokens. The tokens contain information that the application needs to verify. Every application or user needs to be registered in the system to access it.

In Azure AD, applications either use the managed identity or ARBAC for permission control, and we use SaaS on top of that. Policies can be used if there is anything else infrastructure or access-related. 

Permission management works the same way across all cloud platforms. You can have granular or course-grade permissions. It depends on what you want to use and how you want to use it. I'm on Azure, so I know how they use it. 

Azure AD could be more robust and adopt a saturated model, where they can offer unlimited support for a multi-cloud environment.

I have used Azure AD for two years. 

I rate Microsoft's support a nine out of ten. We are preferred partners, so we get high-priority support. 

Positive

I rate Azure Active Directory an eight out of ten.

We use Azure AD to implement conditional access when using Microsoft Network (MSN) services. Our infrastructure is primarily on-prem, and we operate our email in a hybrid environment and use the solution for continuity between our on-prem and cloud landscapes.

The solution improved our organization, especially in terms of security control. Overall, we're 65-70% satisfied with the product.

The most valuable feature is Conditional Access, and we use it extensively.

Azure AD provides a single pane of glass for managing user access; we integrated multiple APIs and use single sign-on for all of our Microsoft products. I can't speak in universal terms, but we had some positive feedback from our users regarding user experience.  

We use the Conditional Access feature to enforce fine-tuned and adaptive access controls, an excellent feature we use to enhance the security of all the machines connected to our domain. Users cannot access long-term data, data from untrusted devices, or data on connected personal devices.  

We use Azure AD Verified ID, which is a good feature for privacy and control of identity data; it offers a good level of secrecy. 

We've been using the solution for over six years now. 

The product is stable. 

The scalability isn't an issue; it depends on our license.

We previously used Microsoft's technical support, which was excellent; they were very responsive. Now, we use a CSP, and their support is lacking, so I rate them five out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup was straightforward, and a partner was present to assist us during the implementation. We have around 250 users, and the solution doesn't require any maintenance.

The product's price is in the midrange. 

I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Azure AD helped to save some time for our IT admins but not for our HR department, as they don't currently have access to the tool.

I recommend the product to those considering it, though it depends on the use case and requirements. If Azure AD has featured you don't need, then going with one of the cheaper competitors could be a better option.   

We use Office 365 for our emails and Office. As part of that, we have Active Directory on the cloud. We want to safeguard things, keeping in mind the recent upsurge in cyber attacks.

I get a single pane of glass view of all the users. I know who has been registered, who has joined, what their last activity was, and when they logged in. If I extend it, I can purchase Intune from Microsoft and I'll be able to do mobile data management.

Single sign-on is the reason we use AD.

I would like to see a better user interface. Right now, it's not that great. Maybe there could be a dashboard view for Active Directory with some pie or bar charts on who is logged in, who is not logged in, and on the activity of each user for the past few days: whether they're active or not active.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for about a year.

It's definitely stable, a 10 out of 10.

We are a small company so it is scalable, seamlessly. We don't even have 100 users, so we don't have any issues with scalability.

We were previously using Gmail, which didn't have anything of this sort, so we moved to Office 365 which has Azure AD. We have joined the domain controller using Azure AD now.

We were not involved in any deployment. It was automatic. The moment we signed in, we were part of Azure. It was straightforward. We just purchased our license, logged in, and we were automatically onboarded to Active Directory seamlessly.

It doesn't require any maintenance. It's managed by Microsoft.

There is a return on investment for us with Azure AD.

Azure AD comes with Office 365, so we are just paying for the Office 365 license.

We did not evaluate other options because Azure AD seems to be the market leader.

Azure AD is one place where you can manage all users and devices and it's safe and secure.

I have come to depend upon Azure AD as my go-to identity management tool. Almost all businesses today use a Microsoft cloud-based product in some form or another, and integration in Azure AD ensures consistency, compliance, and simplified integration across the enterprise.

Additionally, we use many of the built-in security enhancements and features offered by the solution. Single sign-on and other integrations into a range of line-of-business software applications add to the many use cases available through Azure AD. Along with securely extending the on-premises environment to the hybrid state.

The key improvements to our organization are:

1. A singular control plane is enabling a more efficient administrative process.
2. RBAC simplifies role access providing a simpler approach to zero trust.
3. Onboarding and offboarding extend to every integrated application meaning that compliance is maintained.
4. PIM and PAM: Privileged Identity Management and Privileged Identity Management make controlling access considerably easier and ensure that authorized access is achieved.

With so many features available out of the box, it is difficult to adequately summarise in the space provided here.

I find that integration of enterprise applications outside of Microsoft via OATH and SAML is by far one of the most valuable features as it makes software distribution and access simpler and, with SSO enablement, ensures a lower threat surface from end users.

Azure boasts 90 compliance certifications, and this exceeds that of its competitors. With the compliance manager resource, you can control the company’s compliance tasks from one place.

The tool helps you meet complex compliance obligations. For example, you can undertake continuous risk examinations, provide an outlook on your company’s status and provide opportunities for improvement as needed.

With Azure Advisor and the Secure Score continually assessing your security and compliance posture, there is less need for highly paid security engineers. Especially when considering the size of the Microsoft security operations team also monitoring significant portions of the client environment.

It's really difficult to speak to this. The product is constantly undergoing feature enhancement and enrichment, and anything I would like to see coming is already available for public review.

Azure Active Directory is an easy-to-deploy, robust unified identity and access solution that securely extends your existing on-premise infrastructure to the cloud and provides seamless integration for in-house applications and 3rd party SaaS platforms. Granular policy-driven access controls ensure that access is granted only to authorized identities and devices and from approved locations. Azure AD includes an array of security and compliance options to ensure your business governance is adhered to without impacting productivity.

If I had to pick one, it would be to put the features of P1 and P2 into a single license.

I have been using Azure AD for approximately seven years.

The platform is not without its occasional hiccups, however, in general, it is stable and issue-free.

There are few other identity options available with the scale made available by Azure AD.

Support is hit-and-miss. Some days you'll get someone amazing who has the right knowledge and is willing to go beyond to help. And then there are the other times when help isn't forthcoming.

Neutral

The initial configuration is simple. The configuration process is guided so that even a non-technical person can successfully complete the onboarding.

We use Azure AD to manage users in terms of user accounts and profiles. We also use it to manage applications, access control, and application management.

Azure AD has helped improve the onboarding and offboarding process, especially with the user provisioning and SSO. With Azure AD, once a user account is created, the user automatically gets synced across all of our applications without the admin having to touch each application once at a time.

The solution helped improve our onboarding process by saving us a lot of time.

The feature I have found the most valuable is user provisioning (SSO). Azure Active Directory provides a single pane of glass for managing use cases. 

How it works is once it has all been set up, it allows the user to use the same credential – the username and password – across multiple applications. It creates ease of use for the user as they don't have to keep entering a username and password across multiple applications.

Azure AD allows us to manage the users' access from a single point. In a typical environment, if, for example, a user exits the company and the account needs to be disabled, you would have to go across each application to disable that access. With the Microsoft experience, you just have to disable it from the Azure Active Directory, and then it syncs across all of the applications. Once the account is disabled on the Azure, the accounts are disabled on all applications. The user instantly loses access across all applications without the admin having to go to each application one at a time. When you are offboarding an exited user or an employee that leaves the organization, there's no room for error in terms of missing out or forgetting to revoke an access for a particular application.

I would like to see Microsoft communicate how they intend to manage legacy applications. Right now, you still have to deploy a hosted domain server (which comes at an extra cost) if you have a legacy application that cannot sync properly with the enterprise applications and the modern applications.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for about five years now. 

Azure is stable. 

Azure is scalable. 

Microsoft's tech support is very responsive and really supportive. They will work with you if you have any concerns or if you have any issues. They have experts that will be able to jump on a call with you and assist you in making sure that whatever your concerns are, they all get resolved.

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution. 

The initial deployment was straightforward for me because I already had a pretty good experience managing the on-prem Active Directory. The deployment of the directory itself does not take long. However, it took us about a couple of months to carry out the user creation, create the Conditional Access policies, and to test. You have to test your policies before you go live. We had a lot of design to do in terms of setup, testing, rollout, and setup for each feature that we needed to implement. We had more of a test phase before the go-live phase. That's why it took quite a while. 

We did our deployment in-house. We had three people on the deployment. 

We have seen a return on investment from Azure AD because, first of all, we have been able to use the Cloud infrastructure to bring in more response. Also, it has high availability. We can easily scale it up or down, thereby managing costs. Now, in terms of the Azure Active Directory Office 365, we also have scale licenses where we get to manage the licenses across multiple users, thereby reducing costs of having to purchase one per user.

I would say that Azure AD's pricing is very reasonable because of the structure and in terms of the solution. I can offer this tip for the licensing: if you plan on going to a CSV, you can get a certain level of discounts.

We looked at Google Workspace when we were trying to migrate from on-prem to the cloud. At the end of the day, after analyzing and comparing most of the features that we are going to go with and how it will integrate with our existing system, we found the Microsoft Azure Active Directory to be more effective and better suited to our requirements.

This is how Azure AD stacks up against Okta. Okta is a third-party application for syncing user profiles from on-prem to cloud. However, Microsoft already has a pretty good application for that, which is Azure's AD Connect. It's more or less the same thing as Okta and more effective in the sense that with AD Connect we can actually get to query the user objects in terms of all the attributes to work on-prem and on the Cloud, just the same way you probably do it if you run an LDAP query. This is something you might not get with Okta because of the integration with the Active Directory.

My advice to someone looking to implement the solution is: your in-house technical support needs to understand the technology and your requirements as an organization because Azure is very robust. You need to know exactly what you intend to deploy and the requirements you intend or need. If you have that covered, Azure AD will be simple and straightforward to use. If you are able to plan and manage the users and services, it is really cost-effective.

I have identified that Azure Active Directory has a lot of features that are handy and useful. Microsoft is also constantly improving on it and it has all the required features that my organization requires. 

Azure AD is helpful and user friendly when it comes to managing identity and access tasks. It helps you manage that effectively because you have all the clouds, you have profile creation, you have all the features. Everything is easy to locate and simple to navigate.

Azure AD allows us to improve compliance for enforcing fine-tuned and adaptive access controls. It also allows us to manage access to all the applications in our environment. With it, we can create design policies that either the leader or the identify side from HR has to comply with before a particular user gains access into our environment or into a particular service within our environment.

We use Entra's Conditional Access feature in conjunction with Microsoft Endpoint Manager. We do so because one part allows for full control in the endpoint for managing access on the user and that user as an object, and then the other manages the device as an object.

This combination has the ability to reduce the risk of unpatched devices connecting to your corporate network. It will prevent a user from accessing an environment or a service space via a compromised device. If a user, for example, tries to access our network, service, or environment, via a compromised personal device, this combination will help prevent that kind of intrusion. Also, if a corporate authorized device gets compromised, that's when we find out the device is authorized to access that environment. It also helps to manage and restrict access.

Entra has helped our IT administrators and HR department save time. As a rough estimate, I would say it has cut our costs down by 20 hours per week.

Microsoft Entra has affected our employee user experience by helping to manage the end-to-end communication between user, device, and services by creating a very similar communication and very similar to the experience, which allows the user to be able to connect seamlessly to services and also to the device itself.