Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

There are a number of use cases. You can use it as a central point of authentication for giving access to most of your cloud and on-prem resources. For example, you can use Azure AD to give access to a Microsoft 365 application, such as Outlook or Microsoft Teams.

It is quite stable. Being a Microsoft product, it easily integrates with most of the Microsoft solutions. It is very easy to integrate with most of the Microsoft solutions, such as Windows, Microsoft Office, etc. If you have your own internal web applications or you want to integrate with other solutions from other providers, such as AWS or Google, you can link those to Azure AD. If you want to integrate with on-prem resources, you can use your Azure AD on the cloud as the authentication point to give people access to the resources and so on.

It can be used to grant access at a granular level. It provides secure access and many ways to offer security to your user resources. It provides a good level of security for any access on Azure. It gives you options like multi-factor authentication where apart from your password, you can use other factors for authentication, such as a code is sent to your phone or the authenticator app that you can use login. 

It even offers the next level of access management, which gives a password for authentication, and you just use the authenticator app to log in. It enables you to configure things like identity risk awareness to detect if someone logs in from a suspicious location from where they don't normally log in. So, it provides a good level of security features for controlling access to your resources.

Its integration with open-source applications can be improved. I know that they are working on open-source authentication methods for integration with open-source applications, but they can make it more open.

It can be a bit expensive for an organization. There should be a better pricing plan for the license.

I have been using this solution for about four years.

It is quite stable.

It is scalable. In my current organization, we have about 6,000 users on Azure Active Directory.

We are satisfied with their support. They provide different levels of support. They have Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 engineers, and the response time depends on the kind of agreement you have. Some agreements will guarantee you a faster response time 24/7, such as within four hours, so it all depends on your license.

Considering that it runs on the cloud, the setup is quite easy unless you're doing integration with your on-prem Active Directory. For integration with your on-prem Active Directory, you need someone who is technically competent, and then it would be rather straightforward. They do provide engineers who can assist in that deployment, and they also do knowledge transfer to enable you to proceed with the deployment.

The initial deployment of the product usually takes about three months because you have to ensure all the prerequisites have been met. So, if it is a project for a big organization, we can do it in probably three months. If it is something simple, then it doesn't take much time because the only thing that you're doing is to plug into it. It is already running because it is a cloud service. So, the deployment comes in only if you're integrating it with your on-prem resources and, of course, with other applications. Otherwise, it is very straightforward. It is a cloud service, so it is just plug-and-play.

For deployment, we work with Microsoft. We work with them directly, but for enhancements, we use Microsoft partners.

For maintenance, we have a team of about five engineers who run it. Internally, we have about two engineers and a manager in charge, and then we have two engineers in our infrastructure team. It is not that intensive in terms of day-to-day management because it is a cloud service, so everything is running from Microsoft Azure servers. Therefore, the day-to-day administration is not that much.  

It can be a bit expensive for organizations, but they do have different pricing models. Their free tier can be used on a personal level, but for an organization, the licenses might be a bit expensive. In general, the licenses can become cheaper, which will make it accessible for more people.

Currently, where I am working, we use an enterprise agreement. The license is renewed after every two or three years. So, we make an agreement with Microsoft to give us a license for a number of products, including Azure Active Directory, for two or three years.

I would highly recommend this solution. We plan to keep using it for the long term.

It is among the best in the industry, but there is room for improvement. I would rate it an eight out of 10. 

We have deployed an Active Directory model with Active Directory on-premises, and that is providing services to the entire organization. In 2018, we wanted to implement single sign-on with some of our cloud solution partners. That was the main reason that drove us to implement Azure Active Directory. As far as I know, that's the only thing that we use Azure Active Directory for at this moment.

We can call it a hybrid system. All our internal operations are using Active Directory on-premises, but when we need to identify some of our users with applications on the cloud, that's when we use Azure Active Directory.

We are a mid-size company with around 550 users end-users, with the same number of end-user machines. We also run somewhere between 120 and 150 servers.

The reason we implemented it is that we can use it for authentication with some of our service applications, and that makes users' lives easier. They do not need to learn a lot of different passwords and different usernames. The other benefit is that, on the management side, it's very easy because you can have tight control over who is using the application and who is not; who has permissions.

For some applications, it's not only working for authentication but it's also being used to apply roles for users. From the management perspective, it's much better to have this because in the past we constantly needed to go into the console of the different solutions and create or delete users or modify their roles and permissions. Now, with Azure Active Directory, we can do that from a single point. That makes our management model much easier.

As a result, the solution has helped to improve our security, because user management control is very important. In the past, there were times when, for some reason, we forgot about deleting or even creating users for certain applications. Now, because we have only a single point for those processes, there is better control of that and it reduces the risk of information security incidents. That's especially true when you consider the case where we had forgotten to delete some users due to the increasing number of applications in the cloud. We now have five or six applications using single sign-on and that capability is one of our requirements when we introduce a new solution. It has to be compliant with single sign-on and it should have a way to be implemented with Azure Active Directory. It makes our infrastructure more secure.

Among the applications we have that are using single sign-on are Office 365, Concur for expense control, we have an integration with LinkedIn, as well as two other applications. When a user decides to leave the organization, we check that their access to all our internal applications has been closed. That can be done now with a single script. It makes it very easy for us to delete the user from the organizational unit, or from where the group linked to the application.

It makes things a lot more comfortable in terms of security as we don't need to log in to every single application to delete users. We would see, in the past, when we would run a review on an application in the cloud, that suddenly there were, say, 10 users who shouldn't be there. They could still be using the service because we didn't delete them. For some applications it's not that bad, but for others it could be an open security risk because those users would still have access to assets of the organization. We have reduced, almost to zero, the occurrences of forgetting a user.

Azure AD has affected the end-user experience in a positive way because, as I mentioned, they do not need to learn different usernames and different passwords. In addition, when users request access to some of the applications, we just need to assign the user to the different groups we have. These groups have been integrated with the different cloud applications and that means they can have almost immediate access to the applications. It makes it easier for us to assign roles and access. From the user perspective that's good because once they request something they have access to the service in less than 15 minutes.

Implementation of single sign-on with other vendors is quite easy. It might take a couple of hours and everything is running.

We've been using Azure Active Directory for over two years.

The availability of Azure AD is good. I don't have any complaints about it. Regarding the stability, we haven't had any issues with it. We haven't experienced any service interruption. 

Part of our strategy in the short-term is to move most of our Microsoft environment, when it's feasible, to the cloud, because we have seen that the cloud environment offered by Microsoft is really stable. We have proved that with tools like Azure Active Directory. In almost three years we haven't had a single issue with it.

From time to time it takes a little bit of time to replicate, with some of the applications—something like five to 10 minutes. I know that the design is not supposed to enable real-time replication with some of the applications. But, as an administrator, I would like to run a specific change or modification in Azure Active Directory and see it replicated almost immediately. It really only takes a few minutes. Although it doesn't seem to cause any problems for our organization, I would like to see more efficiency when it comes to the different connectors with cloud services.

We haven't had a situation where we need to scale this solution.

We haven't had any major issue with the solution so we haven't called Microsoft technical support for Azure AD so far.

We have always used Active Directory as our dedicated services solution. Three years ago we increased the scope of it and synchronized it with Azure Active Directory. Our on-premises Active Directory is our primary solution. Azure Active Directory is an extension of that.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. It didn't take too long just to get our Azure Active Directory environment set up and running. I think it took less than a day. It was really fast.

We already had Active Directory on-premises, so what we created was the instance of Azure Active Directory. All the different groups, users, and services were already set up. We then replicated with what we currently have in the Azure Active Directory instance. It was not really difficult.

Our company is quite small and that is reflected in our IT department. Azure Active Directory is handled by our infrastructure coordination team, which has only two members. One is the senior engineer who performs all the major changes and the main configurations. We also have a junior engineer who runs all the operations in the company. From time to time, one person from our help desk, usually me, does some small operations when we don't have the infrastructure team available.

We use a reseller to buy the product and they also provide some consulting services. Our relationship with Microsoft is not a direct relationship.

Our reseller is SoftwareONE. They're a global company and our experience with them has been good. We have been with them since 2010 or 2011. We have two or three different services from them related to Microsoft and other brands. They are not exclusively reselling Microsoft licenses. 

From a very subjective point of view, as I haven't drawn any kind of numbers to calculate the return on investment, what I can see so far is that the investment is running smoothly and it's easier for us to run our environment with it.

If you have all your infrastructure built using Microsoft tools, it is straightforward to go with Azure Active Directory. Under these circumstances, I don't see any reason to find another solution.

We have an E3 contract, and I believe Azure AD is included in it.

We didn't evaluate other vendors because our entire environment is based on Microsoft solutions.

As with any implementation, design is key. That would be applicable to Active Directory as well, but when it comes to Azure AD, do not start the installation unless you have an accepted design for it. You shouldn't just start creating objects on it. You need to have a clear strategy behind what you're going to do. That will save you a lot of headaches. If you start without any kind of design, at the end of the road, you can end up saying, "Okay, I think it would have been better to create this organizational unit," or, "We should have enabled this feature." It's probably not very straightforward to implement the changes. So have a team design the Azure Active Directory structure for you. You need to have the map before starting the implementation.

It's something that we use every day. We're migrating all of our customers over to it.

We use it for Office 365 and Azure services.

It's a cloud service. You do not depend on local identities. You can just synchronize the identities. It gives you the opportunity to use the security services that come with Office 365 and Azure. 

It does offer a single pane of glass for getting into all applications. However, we have some customers that have a hybrid environment and it depends on what applications and if the client wants them authenticated with Azure or not. In general, it's been positive for the final user experience.

We do have to manage identities on-premises in Azure and have one point of entry and the solution allows for that.

We use conditional access. That's a must for customers - to be able to verify users and devices. It helps with initiating a zero-trust policy. It's one of the main functionalities we really like. You can get granular with the policies in terms of access. 

We use conditional access in conjunction with Endpoint Manager. We also push Endpoint Manager as a solution to work with devices. That's also something that we try to push to the customers in any project. Most of the time, they go with it and like the idea of being merged with which are Endpoint Manager. Sometimes there are some customers, small customers, that maybe don't want to use that. Our position is to always use an endpoint manager.

It's helped out IT managers a lot in terms of the features on offer. I'm not sure of the exact amount of time that has been saved in general. I'm not involved in the day-to-day management from a customer's perspective. 

It's had a positive effect on the user experience. I'd rate the improvement nine out of ten. 

Support could be improved.

Okta has had more time in the business than Microsoft. I hope, in the roadmap, Microsoft eventually offers the same features as Okta. It will take some more time to mature. 

I've been using the solution for five years.

The solution is scalable. 

Customer support is good. However, it could be better sometimes. They do answer fast, however, the resolution itself is not fast. The first level of support will most likely have to move the issue to level two or three technicians and that process makes the resolution take longer.

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution. I deal strictly with Microsoft. I don't deal with any other companies. I'm dedicated to Microsoft. 

I was involved in the deployment process. It's easy for someone who's done it many times. 

In my department, we have ten to 15 colleagues that can handle these migrations or synchronizations. 

It's an easy product to maintain. 

We do have a customer that has Okta, and while we don't deal with it directly, we know what it does. We don't use it. Okta has specific features that are different from this product, however, it's not something we sell. For example, Microsoft can synchronize users from local to Azure, and not vice versa. Okta can do that, however. Also, the management lifecycle feature in Microsoft isn't as robust as Okta. 

Okta does have a lot of models, as does Microsoft. In both cases, depending on what you need, there would be a different license. 

There are not too many companies that have Okta in Spain, however, those that have would have many environments across AWS, Google, et cetera - not just Microsoft.

We're integrators. We don't use the solution ourselves. 

We do not use Permissions Management. I'm not sure if it is one functionality or a combination of several. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We use Azure Active Directory for our project management proposals. Employees who are onboarding in Active Directory can use project filters for authentication and other back-end tasks. There are different installed environments and staging areas. Different areas are being used for different purposes.

Azure Active Directory provides us with a single pane of glass for managing user access.

Azure AD made organizing information much easier for our organization. The solution also helped the IT and HR departments save up to 50 percent of their time. Based on the time savings, I would say that Azure AD also helped save costs within our organization.

Azure AD positively affected our employees' experience in the company by providing them with a single sign-on portal to access all their accounts in an easy way.

Overall, I think the support and the pictorial format of this web portal are very good. Everything is just a click away, which is very convenient. Previously, we had to write a configuration file to do anything, but now everything can be configured through the user interface. This is a great improvement.

The security policy of Azure Active Directory should be based on a matrix so that we can easily visualize which users have access to what.

I have been using Azure AD for three years.

I give Azure Active Directory an eight out of ten.

I recommend Azure Active Directory.

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.

The main reason for implementing this solution was to help our customers to access internal or external resources seamlessly while allowing them to have full control over access and permissions. 

This enterprise identity service provided our customers with many security features such as single sign-on, multifactor authentication, and conditional access to guard against multiple cybersecurity attacks. 

Most of the clients have either Office 365 with hybrid solutions, a multi-cloud environment and they want to leverage Azure AD to manage access to those clouds or they have hybrid deployments with legacy apps on-premises and on the cloud as well. 

We have applied this solution to multiple organizations and it has helped them manage their environments efficiently. Moreover, it provided a high level of security and security features that are appreciated by most of our clients.

In hybrid scenarios, this is one of the best products you could have. It helped many of our customers to manage resources on-premises and in the cloud from a single dashboard. 

It helped our client to control permissions and review permissions for employees who have left the organization which kept them on-control over access and permissions granted to their employees.

The solution has many valuable aspects, including:

• Password policy enforcement
• Conditional access policies
• Self-service password reset for could users and on-premises
• Azure Active Directory Identity Protection
• Privileged Identity Management
• Multi-factor authentication 
• Passwordless authentication and sign-in
• Business to business and client to business support
• Support for SAML and OAuth

There are many more features that are very useful and can be used as part of the P2 package. There is no need to install any agent or tool to utilize those features except when extending advanced features to the on-premises active directory.

I believe the product is perfect, however, it could be improved if it could integrate with other clouds with fewer efforts and provide the same functionality it provides to Microsoft products.

Most of the features come with a P1 or P2 license. With the free version, you do not get much.

The objects in Azure AD are not managed in organizational units similar to what you get in the windows server active directory, which makes it more difficult to delegate administrative tasks

Azure AD does not support legacy authentication protocols, such as NTLM or Kerberos.

Azure AD is unaware of group policies. If you would like to use the same on-premises group policies, then you need to use the passthrough authentication method with your existing on-premises AD servers. This would compromise the high availability of the cloud and create a single point of failure.

I have been using this tool for more than five years.

A Very stable solution, I never saw the service down, unavailable, or anything like that.

The solution is highly scalable. There are no worries at all about the bandwidth or any other concerns. 

We've had a very positive experience and our clients are adopting it more as their sole identity and access management solution. 

Positive

We did use the SailPoint Identity Platform. There was no cloud solution at that time which is why we switched.

The ease of setup depends on the scenario and the use cases of your organization. 

We are a vendor team and most of the implementation for enterprise clients is done via us or similar vendors. 

The solution has a high ROI when adopted properly in your organization.

Make sure to check which features your organization requires. Find out if they are applicable to all users or just a bunch of them before deciding on buying a license.

We looked at many products, however, I do not want to mention the products' names. 

The solution is our main authentication on our authorization platform to get access to our resources.

The solution is deployed on cloud with Microsoft Azure as the provider. We have around 100 people using this solution in my organization. 

We're using the whole suite: device management, user credentials, everything that's possible.

I would not recommend any changes or improvements right now, in terms of the organization. I think something that is key would be the group policies replication over the cloud, in order to prevent or to avoid relying on the on-premise Active Directory servers and to manage group policies.

I have been using this solution for a year.

The solution is stable.

It is scalable.

We have plans to increase usage. We have been increasing over the past year. I believe we started with about 30 people, and now we have almost 100.

We have only contacted technical support once or twice in the last year. They were very simple tasks.

Setup was very simple initially. Deployment took no more than six weeks, and we only needed two people.

We used a partner to help us and guide us on the deployment.

The licensing costs are yearly. There is a standard fee per user.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.

With a more complex environment, more complex tools are implemented. My thoughts are that they need to have a right and current inventory of applications that are compatible with single sign-on to properly implement that functionality, for example.

My organization uses Microsoft Entra ID for some people who access Azure, especially for people who need Azure for different things. My organization deals with people transitioning from a standard data center environment into a cloud-based one to meet their needs. My organization has certain conditional access to certain people because we have access to government and cloud services or a commercial environment, along with different versions of each of those across different groups. I would say that most of our organization's work is just giving conditional access to people and occasionally vendors, but nothing too absurd.

I don't want to say that the product hasn't improved anything for my organization. The problem with the solution stems more or less from the fact that technology is moving ahead, and my organization needs to try to keep up with the changes, which makes it a new way of doing things that will be applicable to the future. Maybe if we could transition to certain things faster, I would have seen the product's full benefits. Since the areas of transitions related to the solution are slow, I haven't experienced the full depth of what I can do with the product.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to delegate roles to each individual resource, which is great. I think the aforementioned feature is better done in the solution itself than with an actual local AD.

I wish transitioning from Microsoft Active Directory to Microsoft Entra ID was a little easier, and I didn't have to learn so many new concepts. I faced difficulties from Micorosft's end and during the transition from Microsoft Active Directory to Microsoft Entra ID. Sometimes, some of Microsoft's documentation could be a little outdated. The product doesn't meet the organization's niche requirements, especially in our environment. Microsoft Entra ID is not a very standard product.

When I think about the trade-off I have had to go for to get the aforementioned feature, it does annoy me. For me, I can't mirror accounts with the solution. I need to consider that we have so many groups and subscriptions, and I can't just see a blanket of their different individual roles in every single resource if I create an account for someone who takes over a job in the organization. In the solution, some people might have specific roles in one resource, which might be the only thing in there. With Microsoft Entra ID, I can't view every instance, and I have to go one by one subscription all the way down, which is a huge pain when you have 400 to 500 subscriptions. The aforementioned aspects can be considered for the improvement of the solution.

I have been using Microsoft Entra ID for the last five years, but not at its full capacity because, in our organization, we have to ensure that we help with the migration process of different governmental agencies piece by piece since we are a multi-cloud, multi-tenant, multi-forested environment. My organization is a customer of the product.

When it comes to the technical support for the product, I have a representative who works for me, making the support good since I can have him put under fire. I have had some issues with the tool. The IT security audits that come under Microsoft Services Hub are something we needed in Microsoft Gov cloud, and there's only a certain region of Microsoft Gov cloud that supports it, meaning you cannot use Microsoft Services Hub on it, which is all fine as you just have to run it either for by line or you have to run it from within Azure's portal. I had three separate calls with Microsoft's technical support about it, and it was the third tech person who told me after looking at the ticket raised by my organization with the support that the support team had not even finished adding our ticket to their list, which to me was like an organizational issue. Apart from the aforementioned issue I faced with the support team, I feel everything else has been fine. I wouldn't go around saying that Microsoft offers bad technical support.

I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

As the product already existed before I joined my current organization, I was not involved in its deployment phase. I have some past experience with the deployment processes of Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft Active Directory. The deployment process of Microsoft Entra ID was easy, and it is not anything different or terrible.

The time for deployment of the tool depends on the client or the project my organization deals with, and a lot of the clients I have worked for are pretty small teams. I haven't had to do too much in terms of deployment.

My organization hasn't considered switching to a different product, but I know that we have some AWS environments with IAM solutions.

It is easy to use the solution's offering of a single pane of glass for managing user access if you have experience with Azure for a while. During the transitioning period, the depth that revolves around the concepts of blades in Azure can be annoying, especially while attempting to relearn the new places where everything is stored. It feels like Microsoft invented a new language for their new system, but a lot of it is just like an updated version of what it was. I have many people at work who have never heard of Microsoft Entra ID and claim to use Microsoft Active Directory without realizing they are the same. Microsoft Entra ID is just a new version of Microsoft Active Directory.

As a product that offers a single pane of glass, it works great and offers consistency to our organization's security policies if I consider the little or limited Azure we have.

My organization hasn't implemented the tool over 900 other devices yet, so I don't know how it will work after that.

Microsoft Entra Verified ID is good when it comes to privacy and control of identity data. Regarding Microsoft Entra ID, my organization sees a lot of contractors and vendors that come in, which gives us confidence or at least ways to sell it to politicians who have confidence that we can do something.

My organization uses Microsoft Entra Permissions Management, but we are not too in-depth into it. I feel Microsoft Entra Permissions Management is nice. I believe that Microsoft Entra Permissions Management helps reduce risk surface. I don't like one of the top-level tenants in the product. As the product goes down into different resources or subscriptions, I see that agencies own them. Sometimes, I feel my organization's offerings look good, but when I dig into the offerings of other agencies, I realize that we are not good.

The time-saving capabilities of the solution experienced by IT administrators or the HR department in my organization have been more or less the same.

I haven't seen the budget in a way that can help me figure out if using the solution in my organization has helped save money.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.