Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

We are using Azure Active Directory (AD) for:

• Application authentication, which is single sign-on. 
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA). 
• Conditional access for people coming in from non-trusted networks, which are interlinked. 
• Azure AD B2B. 

These are the four big items that we are using.

The flexibility around accessing company systems from anywhere at any time has proven to be very helpful. Organizations decided during the COVID-19 pandemic, on a very short notice, to announce that everyone should be working from home. The good part was that our company was already working under Azure Active Directory, and most of our applications were under Azure at that time. For us, it was a very seamless transition. There were no major impacts on the migration nor did we have to do any special setups or need to configure networks. So, it was a very seamless experience for our users, who used to come into our office, to access systems. They started working from home and there was no difference for them. We did not have to do anything special to support that transition from working from the office to working from home. It was seamless. There was no impact to the end users.

Bringing our many hundreds of applications onto Azure Active Directory single sign-on authentication has had a big impact on users' productivity, usage, and adoption of enterprise applications because they don't need to log in. It is the same credentials and token being used for days and months when people use our systems with hundreds of applications being integrated. From a user perspective, it is quite a seamless experience. They don't need to remember their username, passwords, and other credential information because you are maintaining a single sign-on token. So, it is a big productivity enhancement. Before, we were not using a single sign-on for anything. Now, almost 90 to 95 percent of applications are on Azure Active Directory single sign-on.

The single sign-on is an amazing product. Its integration with the back-end, like MFA and conditional access, is very helpful for enterprise class companies because of changing dynamics as well as how companies and workers interact. Traditionally, companies used to have their own premises, networks, network-level VPN and proxy settings, and networks to access company systems. Now, anyone can work from anywhere within our company. We are a global company who works across more than 60 countries, so it is not always possible to have secure networks. So, we need to secure our applications and data without having a network parameter-level security. 

Azure Active Directory provides us with identity-based authentication, which secures access at the user level and also integrates with conditional access policies and multi-factor authentication helping to increase the identity security for that person. So, the hacking and leaking of passwords is a secondary problem because you will not authenticate a person with one factor. There is a second factor of authentication available to increase the security premise for your company.

The analytics are very helpful. They give you very fine grain data around patterns of usage, such as, who is using it, sign-in attempts, or any failed logins. It also provides detailed analytics, like the amount of users who are using which applications. The application security features let you drill-down reports and generate reports based on the analytics produced via your Active Directory, which is very helpful. This can feed into security operation centers and other things.

One of the areas where Microsoft is very actively working on enhancing is the capabilities around the B2B and B2C areas.

Microsoft is actively pursuing and building new capabilities around identity governance.

There is a concept of cross-tenant trust relationships, which I believe Microsoft is actively pursuing. That is something which in the coming days and years to come by will be very key to the success of Azure Active Directory, because many organizations are going into mergers and acquisitions or spinning off new companies. They will still have to access the old tenant information because of multiple legal reasons, compliance reasons, and all those things. So, there should be some level of tenant-level trust functionality, where you can bring people from other tenants to access some part of your tenant application. So, that is an area which is growing. I believe Microsoft is actively pursuing this, and it will be an interesting piece.

I have been using it for three and a half years.

We have worked very closely with Microsoft over the past few years. We were one of the early adopters as an enterprise. We worked very closely with Microsoft to develop many products and features.

Looking at our journey over the last three and a half years, there were a few stability incidents, which is understandable from any technology platform provider perspective. However, it was overall a very good experience with a stable platform. There were two or three major incidents in the last three years.

There are about eight people who handle the day-to-day maintenance. These people focus on single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and Azure B2B.

The scalability is amazing. Microsoft gets billions of logins every day. They are scaling it every day. They announced an increase in the availability that the SLA guarantees from 99.9 to 99.99 percent from April of this year. Overall, it is very stable and scalable. These are things that we don't need to worry about.

It is fully rolled out to everyone in our organization.

Overall, the technical support is very good. Overall, if you follow the customer support route and raise an incident ticket, then they are very prompt. They work very closely and collaboratively with us. We have a dedicated technical account manager (TAM). We have governance in place. We engage with them bi-weekly. So, we have a pretty good working structure with them.

Identity within Microsoft is a separate division, and we work very closely with them.

We didn't use another solution before Azure AD.

The initial setup was straightforward.

How you plan the tenant and set it up is quite key. There are major components that you need to be aware of: 

• Are you planning to implement multi-factor authentication at the tenant level? 
• What type of conditional access policies do you want to implement? 
• What type of access governance do you want to put in? 
• What type of role catalogue do you want to maintain? 
• What type of structure of the AD organization you want to maintain? 
• What type of device registrations do you want? 

There are some prerequisite checklists available from Microsoft. However, these are quite fundamental decisions. If you don't take the lead on them, these decisions will impact you, then you have to go back and fix them later on. So, plan ahead. 

Initial deployment took us a few months across our organization, but we decided to use most of the elements at a very early stage. So, our use case could be different than other companies. Some organizations that I know have chosen not to deploy multi-factor authentication nor do self-service password reset to deployment, then the user community is impacted with that. It can differ organization to organization based on the scale, number of users, locations, etc. So, there are many factors involved. 

We phased out our deployment over a couple of years, focusing on single sign-on and multi-factor authentication, then self-service password reset and other components. So, we did it as a phased deployment with a small team of four or five people.

I strongly recommend the Microsoft GTP Teams, which are with their R&D division. They have a go into production, dedicated team who work with customers from an end-to-end lifecycle perspective. So, they will help you to build the tenant from scratch, following the right standards and guidelines. For us, it was straightforward, but we started this journey in 2017/2018. It is quite a mature product now.

We work with most managed service providers, like Infosys, TCS, Wipro, etc. We have had good experiences with them. Initially, we worked with Infosys.

We are closing all data centers. Therefore, to build or enhance any existing capability in applications, it could have been very a costly effort for us. Rather than building an authentication platform, we are using a standard-based approach where we just need to plug and play. Instead of going in and reinventing the wheel for every application, we are using a standard out-of-the-box service offering from Azure Active Directory, where we just consume that service, then users have a seamless experience.

Having a single supplier saves you loads of headaches from:

• Multiple suppliers and multiple technologies
• Integrating everything.
• Doing upgrades.
• Maintenance.
• In-house deployment
• Having multiple components of those solutions to work together.
• Managing multiple vendors, supplier support teams, contracts, renewals, and licenses. 

If you are dealing with one supplier with an out-of-the-box solution, which provides you end-to-end capabilities, then it is naturally cheaper and less of a headache to manage and operate.

This solution was the natural choice. There is no vendor nor supplier providing this type of capability right now in the market, especially considering people in organizations are using Office 365. So, it is the natural choice to not to go with a third-party supplier, then try to integrate those third-party solutions and technologies into Microsoft. It is one box and the same Office 365 tenant in the same environment where you operate all your settings. Therefore, it is a very natural, out-of-the-box solution.

Look at the market. However, look at it from an end-to-end perspective, especially focused on your applications and how a solution will integrate with your overall security landscape. This is key. Azure Active Directory provides this capability, integrating with your Office 365 tenant, data security elements, classifications, identity protection, device registrations, and Windows operating system. Everything comes end-to-end integrated. While there is no harm evaluating different tools, Azure AD is an out-of-the-box solution from Microsoft, which is very helpful.

Every day we are increasing the number of users and onboarding new applications. Also, we are growing the B2B feature. We try to use any new feature or enhancement coming in from Microsoft, working very closely with them. It is an ongoing journey.

Dealing with a single supplier is easier rather than dealing with five suppliers. Historically, if you have to do anything like that, then you will end up dealing with at least 10 different vendors and 10 different technologies. It is always interesting and challenging to manage different roadmaps, strategies, upgrade parts, licensing, and contracts. The biggest lesson learnt is wherever you can go with native-cloud tools and technologies, then go for it.

I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10.

I use it for managing identities, access, and security in a centralized way. I help other people use this product.

Using Azure AD has improved our security posture overall, more than anything I've ever worked with.

It enables end-users to be more secure without it actually affecting their work. Usually, security solutions makes it harder for them, so many start using other solutions instead, solutions that are not managed or monitored by the organization. But when we use Azure AD's Conditional Access, for example, as long as they behave, users don't even notice it.

The passwordless feature means they don't even need to have a password anymore. It's easier for users to be more secure. You can invite anyone to collaborate in a secure way. 

Passwordless sign-in, which is one of the new features where you no longer need to have a password, is one of the great features. Passwords have always been hard for end-users, but not so hard to bypass for bad guys. It often doesn't matter how complex or long your password is. If a bad guy can trick you into giving it to him or can sniff your keyboard or your network, or access it through malware, your password doesn't matter anyway. So all the complexity, length of the password, and having to regularly change it is hard for users, but it doesn't stop hackers. And that's what makes passwordless so valuable.

Multi-factor authentication is good as it allows you to answer a notification or even an SMS or a phone call, but that has become more unsecure now because the bad guys are learning new way to bypass these methods. But using passwordless technology, you're not even using a password anymore. You're basically just signing a logon request without actually sending, typing or storing the password. This is awesome for any user, regardless of whether you're a factory worker or a CFO. It's secure and super-simple.

It also stops phishing, which is amazing. If someone tricks a user into going into the "Macrosoft" store or some other site that looks like the real site, they can trick the user into signing in there and then they can steal the password. But if the user is using passwordless, the passwordless solution would say, "Sorry, I don't have a relationship here. I can't sign in." In that way, it can stopping phishing, which is one of the most common attack vectors right now.

Another feature that has improved our security posture is Conditional Access where we can not only say "yes" or "no" to a sign-in, but we can also have conditions. We can say, "Sure, you can sign in, but you need to be part of the right group. You need to come from a managed client. You can't come in with a risky sign-in. You need to come in from a certain platform or a certain network." You can have a really complex set of rules and if those rules are not fulfilled you will not be able to sign in, or we can require MFA or even control the session. That is also a really good security feature.

The B2B feature is another good one where, if I want to give someone access to my my apps or data, instead of creating an account and a password and giving that info to the user, I can invite that user so he or she can use their own existing account. That way, I don't need to manage password resets and the like. The B2B feature enables collaborating with anyone, anytime, anywhere.

The Azure AD Application Proxy, which helps you publish applications in a secure way, is really good, but has room for improvement. We are moving from another solution into the Application Proxy and the other one has features that the App Proxy doesn't have. An example is where the the role you're signing in as will send you to different URLs, a feature that App Proxy doesn't have (yet).

With Azure AD, if you look in detail on any of the features, you will see 20 good things but it can be missing one thing. All over the place there are small features that could be improved, but these improvement is coming out all the time. It's not like, "Oh, it's been a year since new features came out." Features are coming out all the time and I've even contacted Microsoft and requested some changes and they've been implemented as well.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for close to eight years now.

The stability or availability is incredible. It's super-good. However, just the other week, there was an outage for a few hours, so it's not 100 percent. But in Microsoft's defense, that hasn't happened for a long time.

What I also usually point out to people is that if you host your own solution and things break in the middle of the night, who's going to look at it? With this solution, you know that in the first millisecond that something breaks, 10 people or 100 people are looking at it. You get constant feedback about what's going on and you usually get a full report afterwards about what actually happened and how they will prevent them in the future. They are really good at managing these outages.

I don't know what the uptime is, but it's still 99.999 or something like that. It's super-trustworthy, but it's not 100 percent. What is? Still, it's likely much better than a private on-premises solution could ever be.

In terms of scalability there are no limits. I have customers with 10 people and others with up to 300,000, and everything in between. There is no difference. I haven't had to think about memory or disk space or CPU in a long time because everything just works. It's super-scalable.

We have 100 customers and all of them use Azure AD. They are spread all over the world. In Sweden, where I'm from, we have government municipalities, we have private corporations, hospitals, manufacturing. Everybody needs this. It doesn't matter which market or which area you work in. I don't see a target audience for this. It's everyone.

Their tech support is pretty good, depending on who you end up talking to. If you open a support request, you can be asked quite basic questions at first: "Have you tried turning it on and off again?" Sometimes we need to go through five people to get the correct people, the people who know the problem area really well. We usually dig really deep into the area and learn al lot first. We need someone who is expert in this product and who knows exactly how that area of the product works. Sometimes it takes a while to get to the correct person, but once you get there, they're usually super-knowledgeable, super-friendly and quick to reply. It can be tricky to find the right person. But I suppose that is the same in any company. 

Over the years, we have built up a contact network so we can usually contact the right people right away, as we are a Microsoft partner. But because this review is for everyone, I would suggest that you keep asking until you'll end up at the right people.

Overall, Microsoft is really attentive. Previously, you could say, "Can you show me the roadmap for the next three years?" and they would say "Sure." They don't really do that anymore because they say, "It now depends on what you want." We can help influence Microsoft how to prioritize. They have daily and weekly meetings where they discuss "What do people want now? How should we prioritize?" It's a totally new Microsoft compared with a few years ago. If I see something missing, they usually come up with it pretty quickly.

I see people moving from other solutions into Azure AD because they're not satisfied with the other solutions. 

The initial setup is a straightforward process, for such a complex technology. Although there are a lot of moving parts involved in actually setting it up, it is quite easy.

I've set this up for many and, in general, it takes less than a day to get things up and running. Then, of course, there's tons of optional configuration to improve and secure things, but just getting it up and running takes less than a day.

The implementation strategy used to be helping them get to the cloud, by doing things like making sure that they clean up the accounts in the on-premises solution and setting up the synchronization rules. But nowadays, most of my customers are people who have Azure AD in place already. So now I'm trying to enable and configure and improve security configuration. For example, you don't have to set up the passwordless feature and you don't have to do multi-factor authentication. They are optional. So my task now is more one of improving their configuration and turning on security features. A lot of it is secure by default, but some features require you to configure and set them up.

With the licensing there are so many features involved, and different features for different licensing levels. Those levels include the free version, as well as Premium P1, Premium P2. My approach with my clients is usually, "What kind of licenses do you have? Okay, let's improve this, because you have it already. You're paying for it already. Why not use it?" 

The next step is, "These features are included in the licensing you don't have. Do you think it's worth it?" I talk to them, I explain them, and I demonstrate them. They will usually say, "Yeah, we need that one."

I don't know other solutions really deeply. I know of them, but I'm a specialist who is focused on this one. But I realize, when I talked to other specialists in other areas, that they are solving the same problem, so they usually have similar solutions.

What Microsoft is winning on is that people used to say, "Buy the best product, the best in class or best in breed for each area." But that has changed now. "Buy the best ecosystem" is the better approach. If I have Azure AD as my identity and access solution, and if I also use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and the Defender for Office 365, and other Microsoft solutions, I can then go to one portal, one place, and see how my apps are doing, how my users are doing, how my devices are doing, and how my data is doing. You get this super-integrated ecosystem where everything talks to each other. That is the strength.

In my opinion Azure AD is a fantasic standalone product, but you have so much more benefit from using it together with other Microsoft solutions.

The user usually doesn't care if we use Microsoft or any other vendor's to protect his identity or his computer or his data. They just want to do their jobs. But as admin, I see the advantage of using the same provider. I can actually create a query saying, "Show me all users who logged in to Azure AD from a device with this operating system, accessing this application, and who have a risk on their device, where a document is classified as sensitive." I can do all of that in one query for identity application devices and the data. That's the strength, having that insight into everything. And when it comes to security and Azure AD, Microsoft has 3,000 full-time security researchers, and they spend over a billion dollars each year on security research alone.

What's amazing is that the CIA, the FBI, and these big companies or organizations are using Azure AD, and they have really high requirements for audits and protection. As a "regular" organization, you can get the same level of security without have to ask for it. You get to ride on the coattails of that amazing security without spending $1 billion yourself.

If another Microsoft customer is hit by something bad, Microsoft is going to stop it for the rest of its customers. If you're the first to get hit by new bad malware, that may be tough, but all of the other customers are instantly protected because different customers share threat intelligence, in a way. You get the benefit of all the security discoveries that Microsoft makes, instantly.

Talk to someone who knows a lot about it. Sure, you can look at everything on the docs.microsoft.com page, but it can be hard to understand what each feature is and the value it give you. Talk to someone who knows both licensing and technology, to understand what's there and what you should pay for and what you should not pay for.

There are also a lot of good videos out there, like sessions from Microsoft Ignite. You also have the Microsoft Mechanics video series on YouTube with a lot of videos. So if you like to learn through video, there's a lot available for you. You can also go to docs of Microsoft.com and search for Azure AD. You will get like a starting page where you can learn the identity and access basics or also how you integrate apps. There is a link collection with everything and anything you would like to know. Or you can call me.

We are Security advisors. We help people, we train people, we implement it for them, we document it, we teach them, and we talk at seminars. We sell our knowledge. We don't sell solutions. There are 25 people in our company and five to 10 people are working with Azure AD. It's not that we need five for our daily operations, it's just that's how many of us are working with it. In general, a company might need one to five people working on it. If I need to set up a feature for five people or 500,000 people I do the same steps. The thing that is different in bigger companies, is that you need to communicate, you need to educate, you need to write Knowledge Base articles, you need to inform the service desk. All of those things are just to prepare users. But that has nothing to do with Azure AD. The technology is super-simple. It's more that the process around it is different in different companies.

We run in a hybrid model. We have our Active Directory on-premise directory services that we provide. We basically went to Azure so we could provide additional capabilities, like single sign-on and multi-factor authentication.

We are running in a hybrid environment. It is not completely cloud-native. We sync our on-premise directory to the cloud.

It definitely has improved our security posture, certainly from providing that second factor of authentication. It provides more visibility. We can see all facets of the business, e.g., when people are logging into our resources. This solution makes it highly visible to us.

It enhanced our end user experience quite a bit. Instead of the days of having to contact the service desk with challenges for choosing their password, users can go in and do it themselves locally, regardless of where they are in the world. This has certainly made it a better experience accessing their applications. Previously, a lot of times, they had to remember multiple usernames and passwords for different systems. This solution brings it all together, using a single sign-on experience. 

Is this specific to Azure? No. We have had other IdPs that gave us that same experience, but we have more apps that are integrated into Azure today from single sign-on than we had previously. Having that one handy "my apps" page for folks to go to as their one source for being able to gain access to all their apps is a much better experience from my point of view.

• Azure Application Proxy
• Single sign-on capabilities for SAML
• OAuth integrated applications
• The multi-factor authentication piece was desirable.
• Defender for Identity, as of recently.
• Some of the services, like Microsoft MCAS solution. 

These features offer additional layers of security, which is kind of what we were looking for. 

Some of the self-service password utilities certainly helped, given the scenario of the world today with COVID-19 and lockdowns. We certainly benefited from being able to say, "Have our users changed their password remotely." When they connect to the VPN, then sync them back up with the domain. So, that was very beneficial for us as well.

The thing that is a bit annoying is the inability to nest groups. Because we run an Azure hybrid model, we have nested groups on-premise which does not translate well. So, we have written some scripts to kind of work around that. This is a feature request that we have put in previously to be able to use a group that is nested in Active Directory on-premise and have it handled the same way in Azure. That is something that is actively being worked on. 

One of the other things that we felt could be improved upon is from an Application Proxy perspective. We have applications native to SSH, and we want to be able to do app proxy to TCP/IP. It sounds like that is actively on the roadmap now, which was amazing. It makes us very excited that it is coming, because we do have use cases with that as well.

I have been using it for a few years now.

The stability has been pretty rock solid. For the first time, we have seen some instability over the last month. I know there were some issues with Microsoft in terms of one of their stacks. That was something that they addressed pretty quickly though. We were appraised of the issues by our technical account manager, so we were in the know. We weren't left in the dark when something happened, and it was remediated pretty quickly.

We have about five to six folks whose main role is to manage identity, and that is my team at the company. However, we also have administrators all over the globe, handling service desk tickets, e.g., resetting passwords. There are about 30 or 40 people, if you include that level of things. However, from a global admin perspective, we probably have a total of eight people.

It is certainly scalable. Whether you are connecting to a local on-premise directory services organization, or if you are using B2B and B2C. This is part of the vision: At some point, leverage some of the B2B features that we have appointed to us in Azure, which we don't do today. This is certainly something that we are looking at internally as a potential for moving forward. 

We are managing 7,000 to 8,000 users within Azure AD.

This is room for growth.  

We are part of the DPP program. So, we talk to the identity folks at Microsoft on a weekly basis, who are amazing. It has been such a great experience with those folks.

The technical support that we get through the GTP program is amazing. Microsoft Premier Support is pretty good as well. We have called them, but typically we don't have the type of issues that we are calling all the time for. We have a pretty savvy team, and just being plugged into the GTP team has helped us understand new features which are coming out, whether we are part of an active preview or attending an evening where they are doing a webinar to introduce new features to us. The cool thing about that is you do have that line of sight if you need to ask questions or get technical answers. Between our technical account manager and our GTP partner, we do relatively well without having to open too many cases.

We had a different identity provider at one point in time. At the time that we were looking at identity providers, Microsoft really wasn't there from a technical perspective. They are there now, far surpassing some of the things that we have done in the past. So, it was a no-brainer for us. We are very much a Microsoft organization. Primarily, it is the operating system of choice, not only for endpoint service, but it was a pretty good deal to move over and leverage some of the licensing and whatnot for our end users.

From an IdP perspective, we had Okta for quite some time. We had some limitations with Okta that we were looking at Azure to handle. I got pulled in kind of mid-project. I am not really sure when the decision was made, or how it was made, but certainly cost was a factor. We were already licensed for a lot of what was needed to go with Azure, where we were paying Okta separate licensing fees. So, we saved money by switching from Okta to Azure.

The initial setup would have been complex if it had not been for being part of the GTP program. We have gotten a lot of value out of that program in terms of cross-training our team members, catching up on any new features that come out as well as any of the gotchas that the Microsoft team has seen. So, those have benefited us quite a bit.

The deployment probably took six to eight months. Standing up Azure and sinking your directory services, like creating a connector, takes minutes. We could stand that up in the day. What took time was taking all of the applications that we have throughout the environment, migrating them across and doing integrations with single sign-on. You need to have conversations with different application owners as well as potentially pulling in some vendors to do some of the configuration. There may be some apps which are not as straightforward as others, but we thought that the experience was pretty straightforward (to a point) where we can handle a lot of the work ourselves.

When we needed Microsoft, we were able to reach out, talk to them, and get the assistance that we needed. That was super beneficial to us.

There are a lot less calls to our service desk. For some of the traditional, "Hey, I need to reset my password," or "Hey, I'm locked out." So, we're seeing a lot of that self-service, gaining access to the different apps, and having it all be integrated with Azure will take away some of the headache. For example, "I don't know what my password is for GitHub," or, "I don't know what password is for Slack." We are like, "Well, it's the same password that you use every day." So, that has dropped call volume.

If you have a different IdP today, I would take a close look at what your licensing looks like, then reevaluate the licensing that you have with Microsoft 365, and see if you're covered for some of this other stuff. Folks sometimes don't realize that, "Oh, I'm licensed for that service in Azure." This becomes one of those situations where you have the "aha" moment, "Oh, I didn't know we can do that. Alright, let's go down this road." Then, they start to have conversations with Microsoft to see what they can gain. I would recommend that they work closely with their TAM, just to make sure that they are getting the right level of service. They may just not be aware of what is available to them.

We look to gain new features when updating licensing. Every time we go to negotiate an enterprise agreement, we are looking at:

• What are the benefits?
• What are we getting back from Microsoft?
  
  They are very good at working with us to get what we are looking for in terms of working on packaging for pricing.

We did not evaluate other options. The decision was pretty easy. When we initially looked at Okta years ago, Microsoft was also one of the folks that we looked at. Okta was a little more advanced than some of the gallery apps. Then, Microsoft made a huge play and added more gallery-type apps. That helped us quite a bit to move things along.

For others using Azure ID, take cookie online training. They are widely available, free, and give you a very good idea of what path you need to go to. So, if you want to take some professional training to become a guru, then you know what classes to go take and the fundamentals that you need to take before you get into that class. So, I highly recommend taking the video term.

I come from an Active Directory background for more than 20 years. Coming into Azure was actually great. We had somebody leave the company who was managing it, and they said, "Hey David, I know you are working for this other pocket of the business. How would you like to come back to the identity platform?" I said, "Absolutely." So, it was easier for me to come up to speed in several of the advanced areas of Azure, e.g., conditional access policies. We are starting down a zero trust methodology, which has been very exciting for me.

I would give it a solid eight (out of 10). It has a lot of the features that we are looking at. I don't think there are any tools out there that will give you that one magical wand with everything that you are looking for, but certainly this comes close. Microsoft has been working with us to help us through some of the new features and additions that are coming.

The use case for this solution is the access to Office 365, Azure subscriptions, and several software as a service platforms as well as other SaaS-developed applications that we provide access to, such as, OpenID Connect, OAuth, or SAML.

It is a central point where we provide the cloud lock-in for our company. We focus the multi-factor authentication within Azure AD before jumping to other clouds or software as a service offerings. So, it is the central point when you need to access something for our company within the cloud. You go to Azure AD and can authenticate there, then you move from there to the target destination or the single sign-on.

Azure AD added a different layer. We were able to add multi-factor authentication for cloud applications, which was not possible before. We also may reduce our VPN footprint due to the Azure AD application proxy. We have a central point where we have registered our software as a service applications that we obtain from other providers or the applications that we host ourselves.

The most valuable feature is the possibility to create multi-tenant applications alone, or in combination with Azure Active Directory B2C. So, you can provide access to applications for your external partners without having to care about the accounts of external partners, because they will stick it in there as an AD tenant. That is the feature that I like the most.

The solution has features that have helped improve our security posture: 

• A tagging mechanism that we use for identifying who is the owner of an application registration. 
• Conditional access and multi-factor authentication, which are adding a lot to security. 
• The privileged identity management feature that has arisen off privileged access management. This is helping a lot when providing access to certain roles just-in-time. 

They are also still developing several other features that will help us.

It does affect the end user experience. It depends on where they are. When they are within the corporate network, then they already have a second factor that is automatically assigned to them. When they are outside of the company, that is when they have to provide a second factor. That is mostly a SMS message. Now, with the Microsoft Authenticator app that you can install on your mobile phone, we are shifting towards that. This has reduced errors because you may just say that you confirm a message on your mobile phone instead of typing the six-digit code, hoping that you are still in time, and that you entered it correctly. So, it does affect our employees. We try to be up-to-date there.

Mostly, it affects security. It is an obstacle that you have to climb. For example, if you have to enter the code in from the SMS message, then you have to wait for the SMS message to arrive and copy the code, or you have to transfer the code from the SMS message into the field. We reduce that workload for employees by having them be able to receive a message on their phone, then confirm that message. So, security is less of an obstacle, and it is more natural.

The user administration has room for improvement because some parts are not available within the Azure AD portal, but they are available within the Microsoft 365 portal. When I want to assign that to a user, it would be great if that would be available within the Azure AD portal.

It would be awesome to have a feature where you can see the permissions of a user in all their Azure subscriptions. Right now, you have to select a user, then you have to select the subscription to see which permissions the user has in their selected subscriptions. Sometimes, you just want to know, "Does that user have any permissions in any subscriptions?" That would be awesome if that would be available via the portal.

I have been using it for more than two years now.

The stability is very good. They had a problem recently that was hopefully the exception. 

I am looking forward to the adjustment of the SLA that they increased from 99.9 percent to 99.99 percent. With this increase, which should happen on the first of April (not an April joke), this should be a huge improvement for the visibility towards the world because this is a commitment by Microsoft, saying, "We are taking care of Azure AD." I think that is a very good thing.

From my point of view, it scales very well. There are different possibilities to take care of it, depending on what you want to achieve. Lately, they introduced something like administration units, where you can achieve that even a bit further to restrict the access of your administrator to a certain group. So, that should be really helpful for even better scaling.

One company has around 50,000 users and another company has around 200 users. For the bigger company, there are several people involved, three to four people. They are taking care of application registrations as well as the Azure AD Connect synchronization to see if there are any errors, then clear those errors. However, it is mostly the application, registration, and configuration of the Azure AD.

The technical support is great. We have access to a special unit within Microsoft where we have additional support besides the technical support. So, it has been really good working with Microsoft.

We have other tools: 

• Red Hat SSO
• OpenID Connect
• OAuth
• Azure Domain Federation.

We just removed the Azure Domain Federation (AD FS), thanks to the Azure AD.

Deployment time really depends on how you set up your Azure AD. You might: 

• Want to set up Azure AD Connect, then the process takes longer. 
• Just use Azure AD, then the process is much faster. 
• Directly connect to another source of truth, then there is something in-between. 

It really depends on your situation. I would say it takes between an hour and a week.

For the company, I didn't set it up. I did set it up for myself, but that was a simplified situation and I found the process to be straightforward.

Make sure that you get the most out of your Office 365 licenses for Azure AD. If you have additional concerns for users who don't have an Office 365 license, consider Azure AD Premium P1 and P2. Be aware that you have to evaluate your license usage beforehand.

Consider the usage of Azure AD Premium P1 and P2 when you are not assigning Microsoft or Office 365 licenses. This is really important to get access to good features, like conditional access, privilege identity management, and accessory use.

I would rate Azure AD as a nine out of 10.

BDO is a network of firms and a firm is what we call a country. So, we are present in about 160 countries. I am involved in BDO Global, which is not really a firm in the sense that we don't deal directly with clients, but BDO Global hosts IT services for all those 160 countries. A couple of those solutions are a worldwide audit solution that our firms use for financial audits for customers. We have a globally running portal solution, which firms are using to collaborate with our customers directly. All these services are basically based on Azure AD for authentication and authorization. This has been a lifesaver for us, because BDO firms are legally independent, so, we don't have a single identity store worldwide, like other big companies potentially do. We created an IAM solution based on Azure AD that ties all 160 dispersed identity stores back into one. We use that to give access to our services that we run globally.

Azure AD doesn't really give you a version. You just need to take the version as-is because it is a service that Microsoft delivers as a SaaS service. So, we don't have a lot of influence over the version that we use.

Besides tying together all authentications for our 160 countries, it has also been instrumental in getting the collaboration going between our firm countries since normally they are quite isolated. Also, their IT firms are quite isolated. So, Azure AD has made sure that we can collaborate with each other in multiple different systems: the global portal, the Audit application, and Office 365. This allows us to collaborate closer together, even though we are still separated as different countries.

Because it is an identity store, it handles all our authentication. We also use it with a combination of conditional access, which is a way to limit people's authentication or authorization based on where they are, the compliance of their device, and on a whole bunch of other variables that we can set. So, it definitely has been influential as well on the security side. Because it is a SaaS, you have central management over that. You can see all the logins and get reports on who signs in from where. 

There is a lot of artificial intelligence in Azure AD that can monitor behavior of users. If users behave in a strange way, then the authentication can be blocked. For example, if you have a user logging in from China, but it looks like the same user is logging in from America just a few seconds apart. That is a seemingly risky behavior that Azure AD flags for you, then you can block that behavior or have the user provide you with a second factor of authentication. So, there are a lot of security features that come with Azure AD too.

In our scenario, we use a lot of the business-to-business (B2B) features in Azure AD, which allows us to tie multiple Azure AD instances together. That is what we heavily use because every firm or country has their own Azure AD instance. We tie those together by using the B2B functionality in Azure AD. So, that is the most valuable part for us right now.

It has been very instrumental towards a lot of services we run, especially on the single sign-on side. For example, we have 160 countries that all run their own IT but we still are able to provide users with a single sign-on experience towards global applications. So, they have a certain set of accounts that they get from their local IT department, then they use exactly the same account and credentials to sign into global services. For the user, it has been quite instrumental in that space. It is about efficiency, but also about users not having to remember multiple accounts and passwords since it is all single sign-on. Therefore, the single sign-on experience for us has been the most instrumental for the end user experience.

We are using a whole bunch of features:

• We are using privileged identity management, which is also an Azure AD feature. This allows us to give just-in-time, just enough access to privileged accounts. For example, normally you have a named account and you get a few roles based on that named account. If that is a very privileged role, that role always sits on your account all the time. When your account is compromised and the role is on the account, the people that compromise your account have that role. With privileged identity management, I can assign a role to a certain account for a specific amount of time and also for a specific amount of privileges, e.g., I can give somebody global administrator access, then revoke that after an hour automatically. So, when his/her account gets compromised, that role is not present anymore. 
• We use conditional access. 
• We use access reviews, which is basically a mechanism to access reviews on Azure AD groups automatically. So, the group owner gets a notification that they need to review their group member access, and they use that to do reviews. That is all audited and locked. For our ISO process, this is a very convenient mechanism to audit your group access.

We have a custom solution now running to tie all those Azure ADs together. We use the B2B functionality for that. Improvements are already on the roadmap for Azure AD in that area. I think they will make it easier to work together between two different tenants in Azure AD, because normally one tenant is a security boundary. For example, company one has a tenant and company two has a tenant, and then you can do B2B collaboration between those, but it is still quite limited. For our use case, it is enough currently. However, if we want to extend the collaboration even further, then we need an easier way to collaborate between two tenants, but I think that is already on the roadmap of Azure AD anyway.

I have been using it for about six years.

The stability has been very good because it is an underpinning service for many things that Microsoft does:

• The underpinning identity store for Office 365.
• The underpinning identities over Azure services. 

So, the stability has been very good. We haven't had major issues with Azure AD so far.

On the global side, we have around two to three FTEs aligned to this. On the firm side, in the countries, FTE's are aligned to managing identity as well. These FTE numbers differ per firm. In our case, there are about two to three FTEs who are aligned to this. That is normally probably not what you would need, but since we run some custom code around this to be able to do the B2B process, we need about two to three FTEs.

Scalability is not a problem. We don't have to control that because Microsoft does it as a SaaS. However, we have never seen any real performance issues on the authentication stuff. I think they handle that under the hood. Since it is such an important service for them, they keep the scalability quite well. We don't have any scaling concerns. We also can control the scale. It is basically taken care of because it is a SaaS.

It is fully deployed to about 80,000 people worldwide.

We have Microsoft Premier Support, which has been quite good. It is quick. We are mostly into the engineering group quite quickly, and that has been good. I think they also have non-paid support, which has somewhat lower response time SLAs, but we have Premier Support.

Before, we only used local Active Directories because we were not in the cloud. Currently, in BDO Global, we are 100 percent cloud. So, we use Azure AD only.

We haven't run any other solutions than Azure AD.

The initial setup is a relatively straightforward process because Microsoft gives you a lot of guidance on how to do it. They also have a tie-in with local Active Directory. So, if you are running a local Active Directory, you can easily integrate it with Azure AD. It is also one of the more powerful features of the solution because it is a SaaS solution, but you can still tie it in with your local identity store. That makes it quite powerful because many companies, before they go to the cloud, have a local identity store, e.g., Active Directory. Microsoft has a very easy process and some tooling to make it integrate with Azure AD, so your local identities, you can still be leading, but you can sync all those identities up to Azure AD quite easily and keep the identity storage up to date.

We are exclusively using Azure AD in BDO Global. In other BDO countries, most countries use local Active Directory in combination with Azure AD.

If you look at it from a BDO country perspective, you have everything up and running in about a week, if not quicker. In our global setup, that took a little bit longer, because we had to create a solution to synchronize multiple Azure ADs towards the global one. We did that via B2B, so our setup took a little bit longer as it also involved some custom development. If you only deploy Azure AD from a single company perspective, then it should be a relatively quick process.

Deployment is not that hard because it is a SaaS solution, so you don't have to deploy any infrastructure. All that is taken care of by the solution itself. It is a matter of configuring first-time use, then setting up a sync between your own identity store and Azure AD, which is quite an easy process. If you read through the documentation, then you can have that sync running in about a day.

We mostly did the implementation and the custom coding ourselves in combination with people from Microsoft.

The ROI has been quite good because we looked at competitors as well, Ping and Okta, but their license fees were quite high. Also, Azure AD can meet all our use cases. In the beginning, we only used the free version, so that was quite cheap to run. We had some custom code that we needed to develop, but that was due to our specific use case. Overall, the return on investment has been very positive. The solution is not very expensive to run. It is quite stable. For us, it brings a whole lot of capabilities to provide people with a single sign-on experience across the world.

Compared to other big vendors over the past six years, I think we are close to saving $5 million on FTEs and licensing, which is substantial.

MS has a free version of Azure AD as well. So, if you don't do a lot of advanced stuff, then you can use the free version, which is no cost at all because it is underpinning Office 365. 

Some of the services that I mentioned, like conditional access, privileged identity management, and access reviews, come with a certain premium license per user. We negotiated those license fees in what we call a GEA. This is a global Microsoft contract that we have. So, the pricing seems to be quite fair. If I compare it to its competitors, Azure AD is a lot cheaper.

Because Microsoft gives it to you as a SaaS, so there are no infrastructure costs whatsoever that you need to incur. If you use the free version, then it is free. If you use the advanced features (that we use), it is a license fee per user. 

Premier Support is an added cost, but they do it based on the amount of services that you consume. We don't have it specifically for Azure AD because we run a lot of Microsoft technologies. We have an overall Premier Support contract, which is an additional cost. 

We looked at many different vendors for identity because our identity store is quite complicated within BDO, because you don't have that single identity store across all the countries like you see in many other global companies. So, we had a strategy. We looked at other products that could potentially do the same. However, the features that Azure AD gave us the option to do this as we wanted to do it. The other tools that we looked at, Okta and PingFederate, were not able to do the same thing for us back in the day. This is especially because we have many different identity stores within the BDO countries that have to be under the control of those countries. BDO Global cannot and is not allowed to control those identities. We need to allow the countries to control those identities themselves, but we still need a way to tie those altogether on the global side. Azure AD was the only solution that could do that for us.

From a BDO Global perspective, we don't. The firms and countries own their identities and the management around them, and they also need full control on those identities. We as BDO Global are not even allowed to control those, but we do need to provide them with single sign-on experiences. So, Azure AD is the service that allow us to do that. 

Our primary use case was about that control, which is a very specific use case because countries need to control their own identity stores and we are not allowed to control that from a global perspective. Specifically, the control requirement and still being able to have that single sign-on experience led us to Azure AD. The other big vendors that we looked at couldn't do that.

This solution is a prerequisite with some of the bigger Microsoft services, so if you want to use Office 365, Dynamics, etc., then you need Azure AD. However, it is also quite good to use for other services as well because they are currently supporting tens of thousands of other applications that you can sign into with an Azure account. So, it is not only for Microsoft Office, and I think that is probably a misconception in many people's heads. You can use it for many other cloud services as well as a single sign-on solution. My biggest point would be that it can be used for Microsoft services, but people tend to forget that you can also use it for many other services. In that sense, it is just an identity store that you can use across many services, not only Microsoft.

It continues to be one of our primary fundamental services around authentication, so we will keep using it in the future. We are planning to reduce the amount of custom code that we need to tie all these things together. Microsoft has a few things on the roadmap coming up there. We hope that we can decrease the amount of custom code that we need to run around this. The custom code is mostly about synchronizing identities from 160 countries to us. Microsoft will bring some stuff out-of-the-box there so we can hopefully decrease the custom code. It is a fundamental solution for us for identity and single sign-on, so we definitely plan to keep using it.

The biggest thing we learned is that the security boundaries are shifting from what used to be networks, firewalls, and data centers that you owned yourself. The security boundary is more shifting to identity in these cases because people are using cloud services. They use a single identity, and in this case, Azure identity to sign into those cloud services. You are not always controlling where people are signing in from anymore because those services live in the cloud. Where you used to have servers running in your data center, you had far more control on the network, firewalls, and all that stuff to keep those services secure. You now have to rely much more on the identity because the services are running in the cloud. You don't always have control over the network, so people can sign in from every device.

The security boundary is really shifting towards identity. Azure AD gives you a lot of options to secure your identity in a proper way. We use multifactor authentication, the conditional access piece, and privileged identity management, which are all services that Azure AD provides and quite hard to implement on a traditional Active Directory. 

I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10. It is instrumental to everything that we do.

I use Microsoft Entra ID daily as an end customer in an enterprise environment. We are using it for very simple use cases such as authenticating with SSO to third-party solutions.

In a lot of situations, it is easy and free or almost free to use Microsoft Entra MFA.

It could be better if a simple member could understand more easily the prices of the products and packages offered by Microsoft. Additionally, after the first three years of a bigger package, renewal prices could be more transparent as they tend to increase significantly.

I have been working with Microsoft Entra ID for approximately five years.

I haven't had any bad experiences with its stability in the last five years. It works consistently, and any downtime can be monitored through Microsoft State Data Monitor.

Our customers are small businesses, so scalability is not a significant concern for us.

I have a direct contact with the Microsoft Hungarian team. They manage our problems, especially on the enterprise side, and I have heard no negative feedback regarding their response times or SLAs.

Positive

The setup experience was not difficult and I would rate it as eight out of ten. It just required some time to set everything up correctly.

We consulted with the Microsoft Hungarian team for any enterprise-level issues.

Initially, customers can get good prices for a three-year package, but renewal prices tend to increase significantly. If a customer looks for an alternative solution after three years, we often find it cheaper or the same as continuing with Microsoft.

I've worked with the Microsoft Tensor Solution and CI Mentech. We also considered other authentication systems like Ping, Kaseya, and Symantec VIP. In terms of SASE, I've had experience with Netskope, Cloudflare, and Palo Alto.

If you consider SASE aspects, Microsoft Entra is not a leader solution. There are stronger competitors in SASE, like Netskope and Palo Alto, and it may not be the best idea to rely solely on Microsoft solutions if your operation runs on Microsoft.

I'd rate the solution five out of ten.

Microsoft Entra ID has made our organization more secure. 

The tool's most valuable feature is conditional access. 

The product needs to improve its support.

I have been working with the product for five years. 

Microsoft Entra ID is stable. 

The product needs to improve support. There are many steps before you get to someone who can solve the issues. 

Neutral

Microsoft Entra ID's deployment is easy. 

Microsoft Entra ID helps save money since you don't need a second MFA solution. I rate it a nine out of ten. 

We use the solution for single sign-on. 

The product is easy to use. 

Microsoft Entra ID should improve workload identities. It should set conditional access. 

I have been using the product for six years. 

My company has 5000 end users. I rate the product's scalability a nine out of ten. 

The tool's support is not good. However, the documentation is good. 

Negative

The tool's deployment is easy. 

We relied on two resources for deployment. 

I have seen ROI with the tool's use. 

The solution was fairly priced the last time I checked the costs. 

Microsoft Entra ID has helped us save money. It also helped us save 70 percent of the time. I rate it a nine out of ten. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have used Azure AD for two years. 

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

Positive

I rate Azure Active Directory an eight out of ten.