Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

The most valuable features are

• authentication
• authorization
• two-factor authentication
• I have never had a failure.

It's multi-tenant, residing in multiple locations. Authentication happens quickly. Irrespective of whether I'm in Australia, the US, India, or Africa, I don't see any latency. Those are the good features that I rely on.

It also has a variable extension, which is an added value because in Active Directory, if you have to do a schema, you have to make changes on multiple Active Directory instances. But here, as the extension attribute can be done from the application level, it helps you provide the provisioning. 

Another good reason for using Azure AD is that it can connect with other SaaS services. It also has SSOs, which, along with the MFA, makes authentication much easier.

One area where it can improve is connectivity with other systems. Not all systems are connected and you have to do coding to establish a point of connectivity. It supports certain vendors and it supports certain protocols. It is limited in many other aspects at the attribute level.

Also, some of the provisioning filters are not capable enough. You cannot do a date filter on the provisioning.

Perhaps they could also have easy protocols to create the accounts. Instead of just a file upload, they should have an easy connector to do the provisioning part.

I work in a service-based company and I've been using Azure Active Directory for my customers for around 10 years now.

From 2020 to 2022, there have not been more than two or three outages, and none was more than three to four hours long. And those outages may not have occurred the whole time in the entire environment, they may only have been in certain places.

When there is an outage, the end-user experience is affected, but that happens in AWS and in Azure. It happens with any SaaS product. Overall, it has not affected the end-user experience, but when there is an outage in Azure, it will have an impact on our environment.

It's scalable, but if you need more than one region, you have to pay for it. You have to think about how you want the service to be available.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup is easy and straightforward. Setting up Azure AD doesn't require you to do anything. You buy the product from Microsoft and Microsoft sets it up for you. You just establish the connectivity to it. It does not take more than a week or two to complete the setup.

The number of employees you require for deployment and maintenance of the solution depends on how you have set up your provisioning platform. If it is automated, you can have one resource. If you're still in manual, then it depends on the volume of the workload.

Licenses are based on the usage. There is no cap. It's based on the number of users we provision.

A SaaS solution is the best product. You get it at a better price and you have many Windows-based services that are included for free.

I would definitely recommend using Azure AD. Many companies are moving from other vendors to Azure because every company uses Office 365 anyway for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. As soon as you use that, by default, you get an Azure AD account. If you have an Azure AD account, you definitely have features to use. Why would you want to go for another product?

Overall, I haven't seen any major issues with the product.

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.

We use it for authentication. Where we have cloud services, it syncs with Active Directory on-prem. We have about 1,800 people using it.

It's a very scalable solution.

The ability to manage and authenticate against on-premises solutions would be beneficial.

We have been using Azure Active Directory for about four years.

We have had very little requirement for technical support. It's a cloud solution.

We didn't use a different solution. We brought this in when we went into what was called Microsoft 365 in those days.

The setup was pretty straightforward. In terms of maintaining it, we have a team of six infrastructure engineers, and Azure AD is just one of the systems that they manage.

We did it in-house.

It's included within a wider bundle of Microsoft 365 products.

You need to make sure you've thought through how you're going to deal with your on-prem applications because having a hybrid solution like ours brings some challenges.

Ultimately, we will move completely into Azure AD, but we have a lot of on-prem applications and you can't use Azure Active Directory with them. Until we remove those applications and make things cloud-only, we will still need a hybrid solution.

The primary use case is for the authentication of the users. We actually onboarded around 3000 to 4000 users at our go live, which are various application users from across the US and the other regions.

The best feature is the single sign-on provision for the various type of users. That is our sole purpose for working on that and utilizing that service as creating a custom solution for a single sign-on would be difficult when we have around 50 applications within our company that has been used by users across the globe. That includes North America plus Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. It is very difficult and complicated to do things on our own. Instead of doing that, we just acquired the service from Microsoft for single sign-on, and for that purpose, we are using the Microsoft Azure Active Directory authentication.

From our utilization perspective, they are providing almost everything. That said, the customization, like the data sharing between the application, is something that needs to be improved from their side. For example, we are sharing certain types of data. We have a container application structure, so we have a single sign-on application where we are using the Active Directory authentication, and when the user clicks on that application, the information of that user is passed to the child application, and the child application does not authenticate the user again. That is a single sign-on concept, which is available across 50 applications within that container. We pass a lot of various types of data, therefore, there's a limited capability of doing that in Microsoft Azure as, on the Azure Active Directory, we may be able to create some additional attributes, however, there are certain limitations.

Technical support could be better.

I haven't explored all aspects of the solution just yet. There's still more to look at.

We've been using the solution for as far as our last project, in which is currently being used. We have been using it for the last four years.

This is a stable solution. Since our product went live in 2017, we never got an issue with respect to authentication.

The product is scalable. It is not even region-specific. You can change the region. For example, if you want to target European users, you can simply purchase a plan for a European server or something like that. Currently, I know that our application is running in the United States region, and our targeted users are from the United States, so our application is working in the North American region, the east area.

Technical support is a thing they need to improve a lot from their side.

The engineers from the Microsoft side are professional, however, the thing is they're working on the shifts. For example, if you encountered an issue which is affecting our production application, and we talk to a guy from Microsoft in Central Standard Time. While he will be available then if the issue is ongoing for more than eight hours, which exceeds their standard working hours, he will just put a hold on the call and will say that my next representative will get back to you on this issue, and when the next representative arrives you kind of need to start over.

Neutral

The Active Directory just plays a role in authenticating the user, and it doesn't do anything else, just authentication. The services where the deployment is being done, that is a different thing. It is an application service in itself. We have an Azure Active Directory service. Besides that, we have application deployments or application services on Azure as well. That is a separate service, which is used for the deployment of the application, so when a user is accessing the application, he is redirected to the Microsoft Azure authentication application where the authentication is being performed. So far, the authentication has been performed, and that user is being redirected to our actual application, which has been deployed on the Azure service. Therefore, there isn't really a direct deployment per se for this product.

I'm not familiar with the pricing aspect of the solution. The client deals with that end of things. My general understanding is that it is quite expensive.

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten. They do have an outstanding service compared to the competition. 

We are using the solution primarily for demo purposes. We use active data cases from Microsoft. You can run different kinds of virtual machines and different kinds of services. We're currently using it in production.

It's very smooth and very easy to use. 

The performance is good. 

The product is stable.

It's quite scalable.

The initial setup is not complex.

We would like to see more system updates. They should happen more frequently.

I've used the solution for a while. 

The stability has been good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution can scale if you need it to.

About350 people use the solution in our organization.

Their support is not great when you are using cloud solutions, however, when you are using cloud solutions, it's very smooth and very effective. We haven't had any issues. 

I'm not sure if a different solution was used previously.

The installation was not complex. It was pretty simple and pretty straightforward.

The deployment is pretty fast. It takes ten minutes, at a maximum, to set up.

You only need one person for deployment and maintenance. 

I didn't need the help of any third-party integrator or consultant. I was able to handle it myself. 

The solution is pretty affordable. Sometimes you can get a Microsoft voucher to get some sort of discount.

I'd rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Anyone who moves to Azure must have Azure Active Directory.

Azure Active Directory is identity management.

It's something we have to deal with every day. It is present. If you're in a domain environment, you'll need it to log in. If you work in a Microsoft-centric environment, you can't avoid it.

It's in the background and anyone who is a member of a Windows domain must have it.

Many people believe that the Azure Active Directory is overly complicated and antiquated.

Active Directory Windows hasn't evolved that much in over 20 years. Azure Active Directory, has a few nuanced elements. It's fairly straightforward.

I have been dealing with Azure Active Directory for well over 25 years.

Azure Active Directory is very stable.

Azure Active Directory is quite scalable.

When you've been dealing with a piece of technology for 25 years, it's simple, but the public perceives it to be complicated and antiquated.

Active Directory is a Windows component that requires a per-user license. If you're on Azure, it can be free or it's incorporated,  at no extra cost, or it can become extremely complicated.

If there is a cost, it is not expensive, but you have to have it if you are running an Active Directory environment. It's a have to have, not a nice to have.

We are partners with Microsoft.

I would rate Azure Active Directory an eight out of ten.

Microsoft Authenticator is the tool provided to assure that we are using the Microsoft product in the correct way, from the Microsoft point of view.

It's two-factor authentication. I personally use several of them, from Google to Microsoft Authenticator to others. It's a solution that works.

The solution is stable. 

The product is easy to install and quick to deploy.

The solution is secure.

It offers good Microsoft integration capabilities. 

For the moment, I don't have any complaints. 

The pricing is okay, however, it could always be better in the future.

It is a stable, reliable product. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

In terms of scalability, we don't have complaints about this from the users of this kind of solution.

Several people in our company use the product. I am unsure of the exact number. 

When we have problems, we don't go to Microsoft; we complain internally to a group that is responsible for keeping this working. I can't speak to how Microsoft's support is. I've never directly interacted with them.

Positive

I also use Google Authenticator.

I need to use different services to log on. Microsoft promotes its own solutions. For my bank, for instance, I have a solution imposed by my bank. For Google, I have Google Authenticator. For Microsoft Plus. I have Microsoft Authenticator. For our VPN, we use FortiGate, the authenticator.

The installation is easy. You can do the installation on mobile phones and it can be installed on the web. It's not a problem.

The deployment is fast and only takes about two minutes. It's supposed to be done by the end-user.

I have done the implementation myself. I did not need the assistance of any integrators or consultants.

I don't pay a separate licensing fee. It's already included in the service we buy from Microsoft.

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten.

This solution is useful for user management because it is integrated with DNS.

The solution is deployed on cloud and on-premises. We're using the latest version.

We have about 200-250 users. All of our users have local and Active Directory. We don't have plans to increase usage.

It's user friendly.

The solution could be cheaper.

We have been using this solution for about five years.

It's stable.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support is good.

Installation is straightforward. It only took a couple of hours to set everything up.

We pay a yearly license. Licenses are very expensive.

We use Azure Active Directory for the user rules, identity management, user rule validation, authorization, and authentication.

The most valuable features of this solution are definitely the authorization and authentication, and the rule-based user validation.

Azure Active Directory is quite easy to use.

We are quite happy with the Azure Active Directory services we are utilizing.

Definitely, the price could be lower. When we moved from AWS to Azure, we started paying more. The licensing fees were more expensive.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for the last 10 to 15 years.

Azure Active Directory is quite stable.

Azure Active Directory is a scalable solution.

We have approximately 100 users in our company.

We have plans to increase our usage.

Technical support is quite good, they are awesome.

Previously, we were using an open-source solution, but we are happy with the Azure Active Directory solution.

We received the migrations as a direct value add because we are a part of Microsoft MSP.

The Azure Active Directory migration took ten days to complete.

This solution is maintained by a team of three to four people.

We had assistance from a consultant.

We pay an annual subscription fee.

I would recommend this solution to others who are considering using it.

I would rate Azure Active Directory a ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution with our customers that use it.

We're using the solution for a lot of all different things. We have used it to support. We have something called BankID here in Sweden, where you identify yourself to your internet bank and lots of other areas and we have based our connection to BankID using Active Directory. 

It's user-friendly and easy to understand. It's doing work great so far.

We're mainly using templates and using the APIs rather than using the GUI. That's the easiest way to do things.

The initial setup is pretty easy.

The solution scales well.

It's a stable product for the most part.

Something that can be improved is their user interface. It needs to be better.

It's always a good idea to have some kind of expert GUI that you can turn on/off. There are a lot of settings to work through. If you are not that experienced, then maybe you might not want to use them. 

There should be an easier way to set up the regular things and then switch to a more expert kind of wizard to set things up.

We've used the product for many, many years at this point. 

The solution is stable. There aren't issues with bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze. Its performance is good.

We can scale the solution if we need to.

It is my understanding that support is not as good as Cloudflare, however, I haven't been using the support that much for Azure. There is lots of information out there on the internet. If you search, you don't need to contact support often.

The solution has been straightforward to set up. It's simple. It's not overly complex. 

We have a handful of people involved in the initial setup. You don't need very many. They are mostly specialists and technicians. 

While I don't directly deal with tracking ROI, our customers are satisfied with the way we are billing them when we're setting things up. 

The pricing seems to be fine for our clients.

We are an integrator. We are using the latest versions of the product.

New users should know that it's quite easy to set up a sandbox environment and a free account in order to play with it. It's fairly easy to kind of set up the proof of concept.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.