Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

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 it for the single sign-on to different products that we have, and it works pretty well.

In general terms, we use it as an admin tool. If we want to set up accounts for people, it's easier for us to do it like this because everything is connected to different groups.

It's a very intuitive platform. It's easy to create groups and add people.

I have used Okta in the past. Okta is easy to use, and it's also very friendly. Even users who have no tech experience would be able to use Okta.

When it comes to Azure, creating certain things or getting different resources isn't very clear. You need a certain level of knowledge of the system. It could be a little bit more friendly so that some of the things can be done easily, but after everything is created, it's easy to use.

I've been using this solution for five years. In this company, I've been using it for two years, and before that, I used it for about three years.

It's good. It has never hung up.

They're good. We don't have issues with scalability because we are not like Amazon or other companies that are super huge and have got tons of traffic.

I don't handle it directly now, but based on my previous experience, they're pretty fast. I'd rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

There was probably the Google management system, but it works similarly to Azure AD. 

I was not involved in its deployment.

In terms of our environment, it's a private cloud. We have the infrastructure within the platform, but all the software, all the usage, and other things are handled by us. We're private because we're a big company, so we're able to afford it. We're not an IT company, so we don't need so much processing power. So, we use Azure as a PaaS solution.

We use it as a connector for different applications. We have Adobe Sign and applications on AWS. AWS has a translation solution, and people have accounts over there. They have their translations of different products and things like that. That's how we use it.

In terms of maintenance, everything is done by Microsoft. We are just the end users.

The return on investment is easier to calculate with Okta. It's a bit complicated to calculate in the case of Azure. Of course, Azure is already a trusted platform. It's pretty big, and it's handled by Microsoft, so there are no issues with that, but it's easier to check the return on investment with Okta.

I'd recommend Azure Active Directory if you are a big company. For small or medium companies, it's probably not the best idea in the world because of the pricing. If you are a small company, you can probably deploy your own solutions because you're not handling a website with tons of traffic. If you are not like Adidas, Nike, or Walmart, you can do it in a way that is more localized than handling everything through a big price solution. However, Azure tends to provide you with solutions that are easier to use. If it was cheaper, I'd definitely recommend going for it.

I didn't evaluate any other solution. 

I'd rate Azure Active Directory a 10 out of 10.

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.

We use Azure AD to implement Conditional Access policies and privileged access management.

There are plenty of benefits. First, as we had Microsoft AD on-premises, it was very easy to configure Azure AD. We are using the password hash sync for authentication, so authentication on the cloud is very seamless when users use applications on the cloud. That is very important.

Also, with the help of sign-in logs, we are getting information about every application, such as where a user is trying to log in and from which device, making things very crystal clear. We only get this type of transparency and accuracy only from Azure AD.

We use the Conditional Access feature to fine-tune access. We implement a lot of access policies. For example, we want to get rid of client machines with Windows XP and some legacy applications, so we created access policies to prevent logins from those devices and those applications. We have also created policies to prevent logins from certain areas around the world. These abilities are very helpful in preventing phishing and scams.

In addition, there are so many tasks and activities that are automated in Azure AD. For example, we have enabled the password reset self-service so that users can reset a password themselves and log in to their accounts. That is one way it saves time for our help desk team. It no longer requires the help desk. From an administrative perspective, it's very convenient for us to manage and maintain the users of the organization. Azure AD is saving us 10 to 12 hours per week, and that's for just one person who would otherwise be responsible for resetting passwords.

The solution has also prevented so many potential cyber attacks, and that has saved us money. And by saving man-hours, we have saved money. Thirdly, we have been able to reduce manpower. I would estimate it has saved us 20 percent in terms of costs.

Another benefit is that, from a user perspective, it is very smooth and easy to sign in to all the Microsoft applications with the Azure AD sign-in. The UI is very intuitive for Microsoft accounts, so it's very easy for them to log in. We also have single sign-on enabled for desktops, so whenever a user signs in to an application on their machine, they don't need to sign in again and again. With the help of the same token, all other applications can be opened easily.

Two very important features in terms of security are governance and compliance through the Conditional Access policies and Azure Log Analytics.

Also, Azure AD provides a single pane of glass for managing user access.

I mainly work with the Microsoft Security portal so I can get access and privileges to maintain all the security policies, including Conditional Access policies and privilege access management for just-in-time access, as well as Azure AD sign-in logs. These factors are very important.

When it comes to managing identity, we have E5 licenses. We are using every application from Office 365, so it is very easy for us to manage identity with the help of all those applications. We are also using third-party applications that are integrated with Azure AD and that makes access management easy.

From an admin perspective, I would like to see improvement in the Microsoft Graph API.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for six to seven years.

There are some bugs that we find monthly or quarterly, but all the bugs are fixed by Microsoft.

It is scalable.

We have it deployed in Europe and there are about 15,000 users.

I received good technical support when syncing on-premises users to Azure AD. It was very smooth. But for help with Conditional Access, I got poor support.

Neutral

We had on-premises AD and then we introduced Azure AD. We synced all the users from on-premises to Azure AD. Then, with Office 365, we installed Exchange Online and Teams. For single sign-on we have ADFS [Active Directory Federation Services] on-premises, but now we are migrating our applications to Azure AD SSO for single sign-on.

The initial deployment was very straightforward. It only took a day to deploy. The plan was first to get information about our on-premises Active Directory users, computers, and groups, and then we had to determine how many licenses and which types of licenses we needed for those. We also had to think about which type of authentication method we were going to use.

Our deployment involved three to four people.

Maintenance is just checking for updates.

Personally, I feel Microsoft is very costly compared to other products. That is also what management is thinking. But when we consider security and support, Microsoft is better than any other product. It is somehow justified, but I feel it is costly.

I have worked with Okta but for single sign-on only. It does not provide all the features or meet all our demands.

If you want secure data and secure identities, go for Microsoft Azure AD.

The primary use case is as an authentication mechanism or platform for the ISV solution that we offer our customers. When they are authenticating to our application, Azure AD is the solution on the backend the customers are actually using.

I'm a software developer so I write a bunch of integrations between applications and one of them is Azure AD. Our organization itself uses Azure AD for our external solution, which we provide as the authentication mechanism.

The most valuable feature is the authentication platform. Whether that's for users authenticating to applications or for actual applications that we write, authenticating to Microsoft or other applications. We can do app registrations where we're doing client-side or client credential flow authentication from an external app to a hosted Microsoft app or whatever other app within the Microsoft catalog we want to connect to. The focus area has been around being able to integrate and connect to different Microsoft resources using Azure AD to actually provide the authentication piece.

There are a lot of areas where the data from a reporting standpoint is extremely granular. It is great that you're able to get to that data at the same time unless you actually are hands-on with the tool, as it can sometimes be overwhelming to actually be able to decipher what that means. So if you're looking at audit reports or another sort of logging, the amount of information is never the problem within Azure AD, it's trying to distill it down to the information that you want. I think the solution can improve by making the consumption of that data easier for the customers.

I've been working with the solution for five or six years at least. Probably longer. 

The stability is very good. I think it's gone down only a couple of times and when it goes down, there are bigger problems than just us. From my perspective, it is fairly stable.

I think the ease at which you can create new resources and the like from an overarching Azure perspective is phenomenal. I believe Azure AD is scalable. There are some pieces of it that are difficult to use. When assigning layered groups or layered roles to users, trying to figure out the access that a user has can sometimes be a little tricky. But overall I think it follows the Azure model, so it's easy to deploy new pieces as needed.

We have a little over a hundred total users. Azure AD is only accessed by a couple of people within our organization, and they're all based out of our home office in the US. The authentication mechanism is used around the world. We have offices around the US and in Europe that all sign in using Azure AD as the authentication piece. We have 250-ish groups and just over a hundred users.

Previously we used on-prem ADFS. At our organization, we integrate with a whole host of different identity providers; Ping, Okta, and those types, but we've always used a Microsoft product internally for our user setup and access. We switched to Azure AD because our product is also hosted within Azure. As part of that, we actually also switched to a hybrid cloud where we run both on-prem AD and Azure AD online.

There were a couple of hiccups along the way, but the initial setup was fairly straightforward.

The biggest issue for us was getting the sync working from on-prem to the cloud. That was the hardest part. As far as the deployment itself, we went and created an Azure tenant and then created the Azure AD or a portion of it. After that, setting up the sync was really the biggest part.

The implementation was completed in-house, and we integrate it from our product perspective.

Azure AD makes our work a lot easier, but I don't have an actual number to show an ROI.

We're a Microsoft shop, so it basically was the only option that we really had if we wanted to use Azure. Our services host Azure so it made sense for us to use Azure AD.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

We actually integrate with Microsoft Entra and are able to add additional functionality to it. Entra does everything down to the entitlement level within applications, whereas our organization would go a little bit further and go to the object level. But from an overall user access perspective within our cloud environment, Microsoft Entra does give us visibility into what that user's assigned, based on their roles and group access.

We don't use Microsoft Entra in the way that most other companies are going to use it. We're looking at it from a strategic perspective for the security reporting application that we provide our customers. When a customer of ours would be using Microsoft Entra and they want to extend it to provide additional reporting or to actually go down and assign functions at the object level within their applications, they would use our organization to do that. I don't technically use Microsoft Entra to actually view what our users are looking at from a user access perspective.

I don't know if we use it internally at our organization, but in the majority of cases, the clients want to be able to have a place where they can do enterprise-wide identity management. And so that's what they are trying to get to with Entra. That's a question that a lot of our customers have across the board. The functionality that Entra provides is the ability to span across different either business applications or other third-party applications. The customer then has to be able to do identity-based access control from a single-pane-of-glass within our Azure AD instance.

I don't do the actual assignment within our organization from an Azure AD perspective. We extend what Microsoft Entra provides, from a feature functionality perspective. We have a separate IT team that would actually do the user creation and access assignment within Azure AD and I don't know if they use Microsoft Entra to manage all identity and access tasks within the organization.

We're a Microsoft ISV and we connect with a number of different ERP, CRM, and HDM-type systems, but we do security on compliance reporting and functionality.

We integrate with the solution. Customers that are using Entra, would or could use our organization when they need that extra level of detail. We use it for development purposes to actually create a working solution. We support that as far as when we do our reporting from our organizational perspective. I don't use Entra internally at our organization, so we integrate with it from a coding perspective. As far as features and functionality go, we integrate with it and we support it. 

We run the solution on-prem and then we sync that to Azure AD in the cloud, but it's on a normal public cloud, overall.

I think Azure AD is a no-brainer if you're a Microsoft shop and if you have other Microsoft products already. It boils down to what sort of office you're looking for. Being a development shop, it absolutely made sense to us to use Azure AD because we were already using Azure, so it could be included with that offering. If you're not a technical shop then I think you should have to look to see if it's something that you are going to manage, and how many other applications you manage within your organization from an access perspective. If you're doing that across 25, 50, or 100 different applications, then Azure AD is a great choice. If you don't really sign into too many things, then there may be more cost-effective ways out there. It depends on what your use case is.

We use the Authenticator app on our mobile phones and to authenticate for Office 365. We also provide consulting services and recommend Microsoft Authenticator to clients looking for an MFA solution.

The solution improved our and our clients' security; end users are more confident knowing that their information is confidential. Strategic users, VIPs, and admins are protected from potential attacks because their authentication goes through Microsoft Authenticator.

The product has significantly increased our security maturity and gives us comfort knowing we have security in a good, affordable solution.

We have a history of all our authentications and excellent integration with the Microsoft solutions we use at our company. It runs smoothly in Windows and macOS.

I want to see more features to improve security, such as integrated user behavior analysis.

We have been using the solution for two years. 

The tool is stable, we haven't had any issues regarding stability. 

Scaling is easy as the product is hosted in the cloud; it's a robust and trustworthy solution.

Currently, we have 100 end users in our company, and we have some clients with around 1000 end users of Microsoft Authenticator.

We never needed to contact technical support as we have never had any problems, so I can't comment on that.

We previously used JumpCloud before migrating to Microsoft Authenticator, and we did that because it's more affordable and has better integration with Office 365 and the other Microsoft products we implement.

The setup was straightforward. We made an implementation plan and transitioned from using MFA via email and SMS messages to using Microsoft Authenticator.

Our security team is responsible for all our security solutions, and they take care of the maintenance, which I understand to be relatively light.

We have a Security Operation Center in our company. Another company using the same solution without a team like ours may require several hours a month to manage the solution.

We implemented it in-house since we are a consulting services company.

We think the solution is excellent and provides a return on our investment.

I would advise implementing the solution to VIPs and admins; it's affordable, effective, and efficient. I would say training staff on properly using the tool is also essential.

We decided to go straight for the Microsoft offering since we use Office 365.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

When we deployed Microsoft Authenticator for our clients, we initially had some requests for training. We delivered the training, and the end users could adapt to it; the transition was smooth.

The solution is extensively used within our organization.

We use it because we have to onboard our user laptops to our Windows domain. Azure AD provides us with the Windows domain capability.

As an organization, we are going for ISO 27001 compliance. The only way to achieve much of that was to have Azure AD in place. Once Azure was in place, many things, like bringing all our laptops into the domain, and ensuring centralized policy deployment, were taken care of and that is where Azure AD has come in handy.

We use BitLocker for policy enforcement. And now, because of the Microsoft 365 Business Premium package, we get Intune as a part of it. That's very useful for us for setting policies and managing the systems. The biggest strength of Azure AD is Intune. As a user, I rarely go into Azure AD. I would rather go to Intune and work from there.

I've been using Azure Active Directory for the last few years. Since 2020, I've been using it extensively because, where I'm working, we're totally on Azure AD.

There is nothing to be worried about when it comes to stability. It's a cloud product.

We are not worried about scalability because it's a cloud system. It will run and they will scale it. They already have packages wherein you can scale it depending on how many users you have in your system.

Our usage of Azure AD will continue, going forward, as an organization. We are not going to pull back on it. It's only a question of what more we can extract out of it as we go along.

Technical support varies. The problem is that Microsoft has contracted out support to multiple organizations around the world. When you raise a ticket, you may or may not get support from someone in your country or region. That's "Part I". 

"Part II" is that when you get to a support agent, they go by the playbook. While they do a lot of R&D for us when we give them the problem in detail, and they actually find things out and come back to us, they're not willing to go beyond the established guidelines to try to troubleshoot. They will only do so if it becomes a pain-in-the-neck issue and multiple users are reporting that problem. For example I found an issue with Defender and I raised a ticket with the Defender team. That has now been pushed to some sort of a feature update, so things like that do happen.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. There is nothing very complicated about it.

The very basic setup of AD might take between 10 minutes and half an hour. Then, if you sit down and focus on the task, it takes about a couple of days to have all your nodes in place.

In our company, there is another person who is my immediate junior and who reports to me. We are the ones who deploy, use, and maintain the system.

We are using the version that comes with Microsoft 365 Business Premium.

Microsoft has a very weird way of licensing the product. With the standard on-prem edition, we can do a lot of regular, day-to-day maintenance, including creating policies and the like. We can't do that in Azure Active Directory. The Azure system is very basic in nature compared to what the server provides us.

There are add-on components and services, such as identity services, that we have to add to our Azure subscription. Only then can I actually say it's on par with the on-prem server edition.

Why should I pay for a component? It should be included in my subscription. I understand there may be an added fee, but don't remove an essential component. I am a career IT guy. When I start comparing my on-prem server against this cloud edition, I see that there are components missing. The money issue is secondary. Give me a solution that matches the Azure standard edition. They should ensure that whatever I have on my domain controller are the facilities that run here in Azure AD. For example, on the domain controller, if you are my user, I can let you create a 14-character or a 20-character password. I can't do that on Azure AD. To do that, I must get the Directory Services module, which costs me another $100 a month. Let that cost be added to the bill and let me create my configurations as and how I want. Why do they want to restrict me? It's a detrimental business practice.

Still, I say go for it. Don't worry about the pricing. Licensing, at the basic level, is sensible. But you should actively talk to your reseller about the needs of your organization. Costs will vary as you dig deeper into understanding what product or service you need. Independent of your geographic location, talk to a local Microsoft partner and understand the cost. Don't simply go online and order things. I would stress that to anybody in the world, whatever the size of their organization.

The pricing module is pretty straightforward for many of the products. They have a price for up to 300 users for many of the licensed products. Up to 300 users is not considered an enterprise business.

You may have knowledge about the product, but when you talk to somebody else you get a slightly different perspective. Exercise that principle. Talk to one or two vendors, but talk. Spend time on the call. Understand what you want. One person might give you an idea of how you can deploy with your existing products, while another guy might say those products have these weaknesses and these strengths.

From the organizational perspective, it's not the native Azure AD components that provide value to the customer, it's more the other components. If you're a Microsoft 365 Business Premium customer, you get Microsoft 365 Defender. Along with that package, you get something called Secure Score for your organization. The beauty of Secure Score is that it gives you something of a benchmark. It says X percentage of organizations have this particular level of security score and it tells you how you can upgrade your security. It may tell you to enable something or disable a feature. After about a day's time, during which the change percolates across the organization, your security posture goes up a notch. That's a very useful tool for any organization, whatever the size.

The end-user experience is better because we don't have to have so many components on board, compared to other solutions, to do something. For example, even though Defender is a limited version in some critical aspects, it still does its job pretty well. One major benefit of having it is that we can control the policies of Defender from the Intune portal or the Microsoft 365 Defender system because it's backed by Azure AD. Azure AD plays a kind of backend role. 

It doesn't play much of a front-end role wherein I can create a policy. If I have to create a GPO, I must get the Directory Services component. Without that, I cannot create a GPO the way I would with the ordinary service. That's a critical difference. And with Microsoft, as usual, until you go digging around, you'll never know about this. I raised support queries with Microsoft and followed up with the tech support, after which I was informed that until I have Directory Services I can't do anything. This kind of clarity is not provided to the customer. Microsoft's website is really weak when it comes to providing specific details.

I would tell any organization that doesn't have Azure Active Directory today not to spend money on setting up a server and a data center and infrastructure. Simply upgrade your Office subscription, because it eventually happens. The world is divided into two major parts: Microsoft users and Google users, and there may be some percentage that doesn't use either product. If you're using these products and looking at ISO compliance, simply upgrade to Microsoft 365 Business Premium. You'll get Azure AD and then you can go about the rest of your work.

Overall, I rate Azure AD at seven out of 10. There is a huge difference in the capabilities between the on-prem server and the Azure version.

I started using Azure in my organization for user management, identity management, and app security.

I am using purely Azure Active Directory, but I've used Azure Active Directory in a hybrid scenario. I sync my user from on-premises Active Directory to cloud. While I have used the solution in both scenarios, I use it mostly for purely ATS cloud situations.

We don't really have breaches anymore. Now, in most cases, we set up a sign-in policy for risky things, like a user signing in via VPN or they can't sign in based on their location. This security aspect is cool.

If a user wants to sign onto the company's account, but turn on their VPN at the same time, they might not be able to sign in because of the Conditional Access policy set up in place for them. This means their location is different from the trusted site and trusted location. Therefore, they would not be able to sign in. While they might not like it, this is for the security of the organization and its products.

The cloud security part is very valuable. Security is the most important thing in today's world. With Azure Active Directory, there are some features that tell you how you need to improve your security level. It informs you if you set up certain policies, e.g., this is where my users sign in. It tends to let you know if your organization has been breached with this security set up. Therefore, it is easier to know when you have been breached, especially if you set up a Conditional Access policy for your organization.

The authentication, the SSO and MFA, are cool. 

It has easy integration with on-premises applications using the cloud. This was useful in my previous hybrid environment. 

The user management and application management are okay.

There are some features, where if you want to access them, then you need to make use of PowerShell. If someone is not really versed in PowerShell scripting, then they would definitely have issues using some of those features in Azure Active Directory. 

I have been using Azure AD for three years.

Overall, stability is okay. Although, sometimes with the cloud, we have had downtime. In some instances, Microsoft is trying, when it comes to Azure AD, to mitigate any issues as soon as possible. I give them that. They don't have downtime for a long time.

You can extend it as much as you need. For example, you can create as many users as you want on the cloud if you sync your users from on-premises. Therefore, it is highly scalable.

I used to manage about 1,500 users in the cloud. Also, at times, I have worked with organizations who have up to 25,000 users. When it comes to scalability, it is actually okay. Based on your business requirements, small businesses can use Azure Active Directory with no extra cost as well as an organization with more than 10,000 users.

The support is okay, but it is actually different based on your specific issue because they have different teams. For example, when you have issues with cloud identity management, I think those are being handled by Microsoft 365 support, and if you have an issue with your Azure services, the Azure team handles it. 

I can say the support from Microsoft 365 support is awesome because it is free support. Although the experience is not all that awesome every time, and there is no perfect system, when compared to other supports, I would rate them as 10 (out of 10).

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. When I set up Azure Active Directory, I just had to create an Office 365 tenant.

Creating an Office 365 tenant automatically creates an Azure Active Directory organization for you. For example, if I create my user in Microsoft 365 automatically, I see them in Azure Active Directory. I just need to go to Azure Active Directory, set up my policies, and whatever I want to do based on the documentation.

A part of the documentation is actually complex. You need to read it multiple times and reference a lot of links before you can grasp how it works and what you need to do.

The very first time, it took me awhile to set up. However, when setting it up the second time, having to create Azure AD without setting up users was less than three minutes.

I work with a client who has a small organization of 50 users worldwide. With Active Directory, they are spending a lot for 50 users for management, the cost of maintenance, etc. The ROI number is too small for the costs that they are spending on the maintenance of an on-premises setup. So, I migrated them to Azure Active Directory, where it is cost-effective compared to an on-premises setup.

For you to make use of some of the security features, you need to upgrade your licenses. If it is possible, could they just make some features free? For instance, for the Condition Access policy, you need to set that up and be on Azure AD P2 licensing. So if they could make it free or reduce the licensing for small businesses, that would be cool, as I believe security is for everyone.

The product is very good. Sometimes, I try to use Google Workspace, but I still prefer Azure to that solution. I prefer the Azure user interface versus the Google Workspace interface.

Draw out a plan. Know what you want and your requirements. Microsoft has most things in place. If you have an existing setup or MFA agreement with Okta and other services, you can still make use of them at the same time while you are using Azure Active Directory. Just know your requirements, then look for any possible way to integrate what you have with your requirements.

Overall, this solution is okay.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10.

My company provides different types of support for different products. I am a Microsoft Azure support engineer for Azure Active Directory.

We work with multifactor authentication, federation, synchronization of on-premise services to the cloud, migrations from on-premises to the cloud, and role-based access to company services. I also work with the identity services of Azure. I work with certain cases where customers have issues with Office 365. That's because the administration and the role-based access come from the Azure platform. 

We're in the middle of the transition to unify more services. There are many services in terms of networking with the machines and storage accounts.

Azure is a platform, so it doesn't have a version.

Microsoft 365 is a part of the service of Active Directory. Currently, all the people and institutions, such as schools and universities, working from home are getting the benefits of Microsoft 365 in Azure Active Directory. They are indirect users of Azure Active Directory. That's because all the services are with the Azure platform, and all these identities are managed from the cloud. This service is providing a huge contribution to the whole world at this time. For example, my nephew is not going to school currently, but he has to connect every day through Microsoft Teams. I know that it is Active Directory that's managing this authentication, but he doesn't know that.

Azure provides many services related to security, data protection, identity, key networking, and management of the storage accounts with encryption. The whole environment is very secure. Azure works with the security of the services. It is in the backend, and it is the same platform as Microsoft 365 or Office 365. So, if you have Office 365, you're using Azure. The platform source is the same for Azure and Office 365 or Microsoft 365. It is the same platform to manage the users. At a certain point, I guess everything will be together because even though there are too many services, all of them rely on the same platform.

There is a secure way of managing the security and access to your services. If you use Azure in your company, you can manage the type of authentication that you want to use for security. For example, you can manage your company from on-premises and also use the cloud in a hybrid environment. This way the services that Azure provides on the cloud are available for the users that exist on-premises, and this is actually where I'm working right now.

The most important things of Azure Active Directory are the security and the facility to manage all the services and users. It is very easy to manage users and assign roles, permissions, and access. At the same time, it is a very secure environment. Microsoft takes security very seriously. They take care of all the security and all the factors to prevent any kind of data or information compromise.

For data protection and access security, there are many good things that Azure and Azure Active Directory offer. You can choose in how many ways a user can log in to Azure, especially with multifactor authentication. You can choose how, when, and where someone can access a service that you may have on Azure Active Directory. 

For most of the small users, Azure Active Directory is free. So, they don't need to have a paid service for Azure Active Directory.

The platform is constantly changing. Every month, we have new services, and we also have services that are being deprecated to provide a better customer experience. For example, we have a tool that connects the users that exist on-premises to the cloud. The AD connects to this synchronization tool, which has been improved about five times in the last year. Every new version is more flexible with more options. The experience for the users has been improved to make it easier to manage the tool. In addition, the feedback that the customers provide to Microsoft is taken very seriously. For example, there were some authentication features that, for security purposes, had certain limitations. Those limitations still exist, but the portal now has options so that the customers can make custom features to manage their identity. There is a feature called manage identities where you can give flexible access to a person for services. For example, I can give you access as a reader to all my information but only for 12 hours or 24 hours. So, I can decide for how long I want to give you access. In the past, I had to give you a role that was permanent, and now, I can give you a role that will last only a few hours to allow you to do your job. In case you need more time or more features, you need to contact me and request them. 

Similarly, previously, there weren't too many options when you were synchronizing your users from on-premise to the cloud. Now, the system that allows you to make that synchronization has many options. You can select different schemas. You can select which users you want to be a part of the cloud. You can manage many rules. The customization in the whole Azure platform is awesome. All these features that are now a part of the platform were not there in the past. In these three years, I have seen so many changes. There are too many features, and I can see changes every month. There are too many settings that have been improved, especially related to authentication, permissions, and auto management ops. The cloud or the Azure platform is managed by roles that you can assign to different people, and each role has different permissions and access. So, everything is very customizable right now.

I have been working with Azure Active Directory for two years.

Scalability is one of the main features of Azure. You can adjust the services that you have., You can increase them anytime, and if you are not using them, you can downgrade the services to the minimum. The scalability and elasticity are the key features of Azure. They allow you to manage all the resources that you have according to your needs. For example, if you are a big company that is going to have a lot of customers during a period and needs to duplicate or triplicate resources, you can get all those created immediately. When you don't need that many virtual machines, storage accounts, or web services, you can downgrade to the minimum. The pricing will be according to the service that you are using. This is one of the most attractive things for the customers because if you were on-premises, what would you do with all those desktops once you don't need them. On the cloud, it is different. If you don't need it, just remove the service, and you won't be charged. It is very flexible.

I provide support for Azure AD. This is my area of support currently, but sometimes customers have questions about different products or services. Because I'm working on Azure Active Directory, it doesn't mean that I only know about this specific product. We are constantly learning and getting trained. There are too many things to learn more about the Azure platform. I have worked for the billing and subscriptions team, which is a totally different type of support. If a customer has questions about billing, subscriptions, pricing, and discounts available on the platform, I can provide support. If a customer needs help with creating a virtual machine, I can tell the customer to work with another team. If I have the knowledge, I go the extra mile and help them. 

There have been situations where the customers had a ten-year-old server that was no longer supported, and all the services were very old. They were from the time when Azure started, and those services are called classic services. Most of those services are not compatible with today's technologies. In such cases, we had to let the customers know that they need to migrate the services, which can get tough for some of them because not all users have the resources to move services to new technology. In such cases, we work with other teams within our own company and try to find a solution. We always try to find a solution. We are not limited to one solution. We'll research for options and do some brainstorming with other teams, and most of the time, there are no cases that we can't close or are unsolved. Of course, customers might have been expecting a different solution, or they are not open to change, but at a certain point, they will need to accept that some of the resources that they have been using for more than 10 years are now obsolete. 

It is very simple. All you need to do is to create a subscription. When you create an Azure subscription, you will be creating an Azure account. If you are using Office 365, you already have an Azure Active Directory account.

If you go to Azure.com and use your credentials, you would be able to log in. So, you have a basic panel with services related to Active Directory, but if you need to deploy virtual machines or other paid services, you will need to purchase a subscription. I have my own environment, but I only use it for testing and for making records of customer issues to see what's happening or why the problem is coming.

It is a very easy-to-manage platform. There are many guides. As soon as you enter the portal, you will see all products and services. Every time you click on any specific service, you will find information about the service, its pricing, etc. You will get the required information needed on the platform. I also have experience with IBM's platform, but it was not as easy to handle as the Azure platform. 

The basic tier of Azure Active Directory is free, so many users use the service for free. For a small company having the security and compliance that Azure offers is a great benefit. For small companies that are using the basic services, not having to pay for Azure Active Directory is the main asset because they can manage their users and have authentications tools and security. 

You just need to create an Azure account to get a free trial or subscription. If you sign up for a free subscription, you will have $200 that you can use for a month on any services that you want to try or test. If you're planning to use a paid subscription, you can't have the first month for free until you spend those $200. At that point, you can decide if you want to continue using the platform. You will be paying only for the services that you use. If you have a virtual machine, but you don't use the virtual machine, you won't be charged for that virtual machine. There are, however, some limitations. If you choose to have storage linked to the virtual machine, the storage is charged differently. 

Azure has different tiers. You can use the standard free version. You can have the B1 license that gives you more services. There is a B2 license that extends to even more objects, more users, and more services. So, depending on the license that you have for the product, the capacity changes. The basic tier allows you to manage a certain number of objects, which can be users, groups, permissions, etc. The number is limited because you are using the free version. If you want to manage a bigger company or more objects, you can just purchase a B1 license. If you need more, you can change to the B2 license that's a top tier. 

If the size of your company changes or you need to reduce the number of licenses or services, you can always cancel licenses. You can go back to the lower tier at any time depending on your needs. Most of the big companies use the higher tiers because they have many employees. In domains like education, there are many students, so they need to use more licenses, but most of the small companies or users who are using it for a project use the free version.

If you need to purchase a service, for each and every service that Azure offers, there are different pricing tiers. For example, you don't have to purchase a virtual machine that is too expensive. There are basic virtual machines that may cost you $40 for one month. If you need a very specific machine to do a deployment, you can use it just for the deployment and then delete the virtual machine. You have to pay it only for the hours for which you used that machine, which is a great advantage. If you work with data processing or you're a developer who needs to test new software or a game, you don't need to pay a huge amount of money for a specific virtual machine. You will only be paying for the hours that you need to do the testing. You don't have to pay $6,000 for high-end technology. I know that the idea is to keep people using the virtual machine, the storage account, or any service they have, but if their needs are just limited for a few hours of the month, that's what they will be paying for. So, it is very flexible.

I would recommend Azure Active Directory to everybody. I would recommend others to use it to easily manage all the users. If you are dependent on an on-premises server, those servers may fail. Some people have too many old servers. If you move to the cloud, you don't have to worry about hardware maintenance.

Microsoft offers several ways to keep your data safe on the cloud. For example, you can choose replication. That means that your data will be at two different data centers. You can have your information at two different locations, such as in the east of the USA and in the west of the USA. If you are paying for higher services, all your information can also be in another country or region. So, all the information that a company may have in Azure will be protected if something catastrophic happens, which is something very important, especially for large companies. 

The improvements to the platform are constant, and the feedback that the customers provide to Microsoft is taken very seriously. They have a feedback page where the users can request new features or existing features that they are not happy about. Microsoft takes into account all these requests, and I see the response from the backend team or developers. I can see how they provide new products or good information about what they are doing right now to improve the services. Most of the requests are for new services and ideas, and most of those ideas are seriously reviewed. I can see that over the last few years, how many of these requests have become a part of the platform. So, you see improvements everywhere. There is also a change in Office 365, which will be soon known as Microsoft 365. They're changing the experience, and they are also changing the licenses to include more products. So, changes are constant. I am not saying this because I work for Microsoft. I have also worked for Amazon, and I see similar structures. They are making changes all the time.

Every day, I see the requests of customers and the response from Microsoft to those requests. When all these improvements are added to the platform, for those of us who are on support, the cases become easier to manage. It gets easier to provide solutions because we have more options to resolve the problems, and the customers also have more options. 

There are times when customers don't realize that the platform has changed and the services they used don't exist anymore. Usually, we provide support through Microsoft Teams and remote sessions. So, we go there, and we explain to the customer that they can do this because the platform allows them to select this and then do customization. So, everything is flexible. The customers sometimes are very surprised because they don't know that the platform has changed so fast. The experience of providing support becomes very nice when a customer is amazed by all the new features. They had been working in the old way, and they didn't know that they now have many options on the platform. In such cases, it is a very satisfactory experience for the customer and also for us. In some cases, it takes about 10 minutes, and the problem is solved. The customer becomes very satisfied with the solution.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. I can't tell how happy people are when they call and are looking for such a service, and they realize that it already exists. They just didn't know about it. This rating is not based on the experience that I have in working with Microsoft; it is based on the experience of the customers I work with.