Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

We use  Azure Active Directory to provide all the identity services for all of our applications.

As a company, you want effective identity and access management. You are able to achieve this with Azure Active Directory, you are able to manage everything, such as building user provisioning into third-party applications, or single sign-on, and tools to mitigate threats or risky sign-ins. There are a lot of features that are provided.

The solution has some great features, such as identity governance, and user self-service. The Outlook application is very good and is used by a lot of people even if they are using Google services.

Azure Active Directory could improve by having an authentication service for laptops or desktop computers running Mac and Linux operating systems. They currently have authentication capabilities for Microsoft Windows. Having this capability would benefit people because in today's world everybody is working from the home environment.

I have been using Azure Active Directory within the past 12 months.

The solution is stable. There was one global outage that lasted approximately four hours in the past year.

Microsoft has different kinds of support you can have. If you pay then you will receive premium support which is very good.

I have previously used Google G Suite.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Azure Active Directory is more expensive than Google, but the capabilities they provide are superior.

I have evaluated SalePoint which is another very good product for collaboration that is available on the B2C platform.

The people who are considering Azure Active Directory should look at it as a whole because even if their company is using G Suite, they will still have to go to Office 365 for accounting and finance users who are very familiar with MS Excel and still want to use it. I see most of the companies that are using G Suite will have Office 365 for certain services. There is no need to have two services, a single Office 365 platform will provide all the capabilities needed.

I rate Azure Active Directory a nine out of ten.

Our use case for Azure AD is principally to do the role-based access management for our resources. So, we essentially use it for authentication operations for our primary groups and users to secure access to resources.

It has helped in improving our security posture. It is modeled around that. It is an AD, which means it is a directory of users, objects, and resources, and there is a lot of security in terms of the access model and in terms of who is accessing those resources.

In terms of user experience, it is pretty seamless for any user to use Azure Active Directory. The way its security model works is that once you sign in to Azure Active Directory, you get access to a lot of applications and systems that have Single Sign-on enabled. So, Azure Active Directory works seamlessly as an identity provider for many applications such as Slack, GitHub, etc. That's one of the best parts of it. If it is used properly, only by using the Azure Active Directory sign-in, a person can access different resources, which really improves the user experience.

We've benefited from all the security or AD features of this solution. Azure Active Directory is the only directory we've been using, and we make use of pretty much all the features, including the user identity protection features such as MFA. The way it allows us to audit who is logging in and do our work in a secure manner is one of the best features of it.

Azure Active Directory provides access to resources in a very secure manner. We can detect which user is logging in to access resources on the cloud. It gives us a comprehensive audit trace in terms of from where a user signed in and whether a sign-in is a risky sign-in or a normal sign-in. So, there is a lot of security around the access to resources, which helps us in realizing that a particular sign-in is not a normal sign-in. If a sign-in is not normal, Azure Active Directory automatically blocks it for us and sends us an email, and unless we allow that user, he or she won't be able to log in. So, the User Identity Protection feature is the most liked feature for me in Azure Active Directory.

Generally, everything works pretty well, but sometimes, Azure Active Directory has outages on the Microsoft side of things. These outages really have a very big impact on the users, applications, and everything else because they are closely tied to the Azure AD ecosystem. So, whenever there is an outage, it is really difficult because all things start failing. This happens very rarely, but when it happens, there is a big impact.

I've been working as a DevOps engineer for the last four years, and I have been using Azure Active Directory during this time. I got to know it really well over the last two years in my current job and as a part of my Azure Security certification, where I get to know how to secure everything in the cloud by using Azure Active Directory.

It is available most of the time. Only once in the last six months, we faced an issue. So, it is very reliable.

It is managed by Microsoft, so it is not something that is in our hands. We don't manage the infrastructure side and the scalability side.

My present organization is a startup with around a hundred people. There are 5 to 10 people who primarily work in the CloudOps and DevOps space, and we work with Azure Active Directory at some point in time. All people who have resources in Azure, such as the cloud administrators and people from the CloudOps team and the DevOps team, work with Azure AD.

In terms of resources, there are around 100 to 150 resources that we manage within it.

Microsoft has extensive documentation on its website about how to set up things in Azure AD. There are also video tutorials. So, typically, we don't need to engage technical support to do anything.

Only when there is an outage or something like that, we had to engage someone from Microsoft. For example, when there was an outage, we didn't know what was happening. There were some strange behaviors in certain applications, and that's when we involved Microsoft's technical support. 

They are very reliable, and they are very fast to respond. The response time also depends on the support plan that an organization has with Microsoft. 

I haven't used any other Identity Provider solution.

Our organization has definitely seen a return on its investment from using Azure Active Directory. It ties really well with the Azure ecosystem, which is why it makes sense to use Azure Active Directory to access resources.

Azure Active Directory has a very extensive licensing model. Most of the features are available in the free and basic version, and then there are premium P1 and P2 editions. The licensing model is based on how many users you have per month. In Australia, for a P1 license, the cost is 8 dollars.

With P1 and P2 licenses, you get a lot of goodies around the security side of things. For example, User Identity Protection is available only in P2. These are extra features that allow you to have a pretty good security posture, but most of the required things are available in the free and basic version.

I would definitely recommend this solution. I have been using it extensively, and it works really well. It is one of the best Identity Provider solutions out there. You have all the guidance from Microsoft to set things up, and if there is an issue, their technical support is highly available. 

It has been around for a while now, and most organizations leverage Active Directory as their on-premises identity provider. This is just Azure managing your Active Directory for you. It is pretty popular and rock-solid.

I haven't used any other Identity Provider solution, which makes it hard for me to compare it with others. Based on my experience and the things that I have done and learned over time, I would rate Azure Active Directory a nine out of 10. 

I use this solution as an identity platform for Microsoft Applications including Office 365. We have found that users have third-party applications for authentication using an integrated identity infrastructure.

The most valuable features of this solution are security, the conditional access feature, and multifactor authentication.

The conditional access policies allow us to restrict logins based on security parameters. It helps us to reduce attacks for a more secure environment.

Multifactor authentication is for a more secure way of authenticating our use.

All our on-premises identities are synchronized to Azure Active Directory. We have an advanced license that enables conditional access based on logins, and suspicious behaviors. 

Active Directory is able to determine if a particular user signing in from a trusted IP or if there are two different sign-ins from two different locations. It will flag this latter incident as a potential compromise of a user's account. 

In terms of security, it provides us with the features to alert us if there are any fraudulent attempts from a user identity perspective.

It provides access to our Azure infrastructure and allows us to assign roles and specific aspects to different subscriptions. It has several built-in roles that you can assign to individual users based on their job scope. It allows for granular provisioning.

With onboarding applications, you are able to register applications in Azure Active Directory, which allows you to use it as a portal for access as well.

Azure Active Directory enhances the user experience because they do not have various IDs for different applications. They are using one single on-premises ID to synchronize and they are able to access various different applications that are presented to them.

If you have a new application, you will export the application within Azure AD and we add access to those who need that application and you are able to use the corporate ID and password to access it.

Azure Active Directory is a good platform for us. We rely heavily on providing our users a good system and interface that we seldom have issues with.

The management interface has some areas that need improvement. It doesn't give you an overview similar to a dashboard view for Azure Active Directory. The view can be complicated. There are many different tabs and you have to drill down into each individual area to find additional information.

There are too many features available, more than we can use.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for three years.

It's quite stable. There are no issues with the stability.

The identity platform is quite robust.

It is very scalable. We have deployed it globally for approximately 10,000 users and experienced not many issues. In fact, we have not encountered any issues so far.

Generally, we don't have issues that require technical support. We have multiple domains within the Azure AD and we had an issue where SharePoint users were not able to access the domain.

We had a prompt response and were able to identify what the issue was. We were given specific tasks which led to resolving the issue.

I would rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Previously, we did not use another solution. Primarily it was an on-premises Active Directory that we synchronized to the cloud.

The initial setup was completed by a separate team.

We have five global administrators who are primarily responsible for providing access and assigning roles for all the various different groups and teams that have different subscriptions, and they will manage their subscriptions based on the roles that they are assigned.

In terms of deployment, Active Directory ensures that there is express route connectivity from an on-premises data center to Azure and ensures that there are sufficient redundancies in Azure Active Directory Connect Servers and Domain Controllers. 

We have seen a return on our investment. I would say that it is one of the key components of our identity solution

The pricing is very flexible. There are a few tiers of licensing, and it is a part of an enterprise contract.

It is bundled with other services and the pricing is quite reasonable.

We did not evaluate other solutions.

I would strongly recommend implementing Azure Active Directory.

For new organizations, it would be best to start implementing directly on the cloud, and for our existing organizations who have on-premises solutions, it would be seamless to synchronize the on-premises user with the cloud and use that. 

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

I am an operational engineer and consultant that assists organizations with their Azure Active Directory implementation. I primarily deal with administrative functions in my day-to-day tasks. I am responsible for creating and configuring Azure AD users and groups, as well as assigning the dynamic membership required by the organization to their users. Another common task is that I set up guest user access for organizations that want to grant access to users on a temporary basis.

For customers that want to use a cloud-based deployment, I can assist them with that. In cases where the customer wants an on-premises deployment then we will provide them with help using AD Connect, which is used for synchronization between cloud-based and on-premises data.

This solution helps to improve security for our clients using a specific directory structure and by using a variety of options. There is a default directory, which is owned by Microsoft, and in there you can create custom directories for your use. 

There is a panel available for the administration of users, groups, and external identities. 

Options are included for uploading your on-premises applications to the cloud, and they can be registered with Azure. This means that you can also create your own applications.

Identity governance is available for paid users.

Using Azure Active Directory has benefitted several of my clients, with an example being a startup organization. Startups have three or four things that they need to do in order to begin work. First, they need a domain, and after that, they need a DNS record to be created for their domain. For instance, these services are provided by godaddy.com or similar vendors. Once these steps are complete, they connect to Azure AD with the help of the DNS record that was created. At this point, Azure AD performs the role of a Platform as a Service. Once Active Directory is connected and verified, you can create the users and groups, and begin managing your processes. 

These are the only steps that are required for a startup. For an enterprise that wants to migrate its on-premises data to the cloud, there are several additional steps. For instance, you need to create a virtual machine and install your server. Alternatively, if you already have a server, it can be connected with the help of AD Connect.

This is a good solution for end-users because the vendor provides good documentation and if the users experience errors or issues, they get a popup alert to explain the problem. Furthermore, it can provide a solution to resolve the issue.

The most valuable feature is Identity and Access Management. As an IT administrator, this feature allows me to manage access for users and groups.

This product is easy to use and easy to manage.

The application policies, licensing, and AD Connect options are valuable.

Multifactor authentication provides more security. Having a user ID and password is compulsory but after that, you can add different security features. For example, it can work with biometrics such as fingerprints, retinal scans, and facial recognition. There are many more options that may suit you better, as per your requirements.

When you log in to the Azure portal, there is an option available called Resource Groups. Here, you can add multiple things including printers and different servers. There are Windows servers available, as well as servers hosting many different flavors of Linux. Once a server is created, you can add in a database, for instance.

There are four levels of subscription and the security features are not available for free. At the free or basic level of service, Azure should provide identity protection features including single sign-on and multifactor authentication. These are the most important features for organizations and everybody should be able to utilize them for working remotely.

I have been working with Azure Active Directory for approximately three years.

Worldwide, Azure has many servers available and in fact, they are the largest cloud organization in the world. As long as you are paying for the service, you don't have to worry about availability. There is a Microsoft backend team available that can provide you with what you need.

The availability is the best in the cloud industry.

You don't need to create or manage your own infrastructure, as it is handled by the Azure team. Also, through the Azure portal, you can add databases.

This is a scalable product. You can scale it to any number of users and any number of servers, and there is no issue. As your organization grows day by day, you can increase your users, your databases, and compute services including RAM, CPU, and networking capabilities. This will ensure availability on the platform.

If you are part of a very large organization, with between 50,000 and one million users, then you might generate between 500 and 1,000 terabytes of data each day. You have two options for uploading this data to the cloud, including an online option and an offline option. In the online option, you use a gateway. The offline option includes Data Box, which is a device used to transfer your data. These hold 800 terabytes and above.

I have not used technical support from Microsoft myself. However, it is available and they can provide proper resolution to problems that people are having.

The support documentation that is supplied on the web page is very good. If anything changes then there is a section for notes in the documentation that explains it.

Using technical support is a more cost-effective solution than hiring somebody to maintain the product full-time.

The initial setup is not a complex process. It is simplest in a cloud-based deployment and it will not take much time. If your current server is on-premises then you only need two things. One is your enterprise domain users, which have full access permissions. The other is a global administrator on the cloud side. Both sides need to be integrated and this is done with the help of Azure AD connect. Once this is complete, you can have interaction between your on-premises data and cloud data.

It is helpful to have a basic level of understanding of the product prior to implementing it.

We provide support to our customers, depending on the error or issues that they are having.

There are four different levels of subscription including the free level, one that includes the Office 365 applications, the Premium 1 (P1) level, and the Premium 2 (P2) level. There are different options available for each of the different levels.

Everybody can get a one-month free trial.

This product is cheaper than Amazon AWS and Google GCP.

I do not use the other Active Directory solutions, although I do check on them from time to time. One thing I have noted is that the Google platform charges you on an hourly basis. In the case where you need a virtual machine for only one or two hours, this is a good option. However, if you forget to log out of your machine, then the cost will be large.

AWS provides you with a one-month free trial so that you can test using the resources.

At this time, Azure AD is the biggest cloud Platform as a Service that is available. They have 60+ cloud data centers available worldwide, which is more than any other organization. It is a service that I recommend.

My advice for anybody interested in this product is to utilize the free trial. Microsoft will not charge you anything for the first month. They will also give you a $200 credit so that you can use the services.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We provide a pipeline for Azure Active Directory. We are working with premium clients, giving them services, like SaaS application services through Azure Active Directory. Also, we help external clients who are planning to migrate from on-prem to Azure Active Directory. We help them with the setup, etc.

We are providing Office 365 access from Azure Active Directory. We are enabling multi-factor authentication and assigning the licenses for end users.

We can provide access for many SaaS analytics tools, like ERP and CRM. We can provide access from everywhere to Azure AD. So, it will work as an authentication service, then we can provide access to particular SaaS applications. Therefore, we manage all accesses and privileges within Azure AD for different applications.

The Privileged Identity Management is a good feature. The identity products of Azure Active Directory are good features. 

There are role-based access controls. Both built-in and custom roles are very useful and good for giving permissions to a particular set of users. 

Privileged identity access lets you manage, control, and monitor permissions of a particular set of users or group. This is a good way to control the access. With the rollback access control, that will secure your environment, e.g., if you want to secure it from an authentication point of view. So, if you are an authentication provider service, your request will go for authentication, then it will go back for service authentication. So, this is a good feature in Azure Active Directory.

Azure AD has features that have helped improve our security posture and our client's security posture. We don't have to manage many things because there are some built-in features inside it. We can set it up once and it will work as an auto process, which is good from our side. On the clients' side, it will then not be challenging when managing stuff, as it will be very easy to manage the client end.

Azure AD needs to be more in sync. The synchronization can be time-consuming. 

The availability is good. I have never experienced any downtime.

The scalability is great. If we will go with the custom installation version of Azure AD Connect, i.e., for many users, then we can go with the custom settings. 

I have one client with one tenant. We verified their domain and created many users. It was already on-prem, so we synced all the users from on-prem to Azure AD. We gave those users Office 365 permission from the Office 365 admin center. From there, we enabled the MFA and assigned the licenses. 

We have migrated 10,000 to 12,000 objects from on-prem to Azure AD previously.

Whenever I have logged a case with Microsoft, their technical support replies within 24 hours with an email and a call, which is good.

Previously, our clients only had on-premises Active Directory. They migrated to Azure AD because they didn't want to keep their on-prem environment. There are a lot of challenges with maintaining those servers and other costs. 

It is also a good service. From one console, we can manage many things. It is better if we can work with it from a single console, managing it all with fewer resources. With on-prem, there are many domain controllers that we need for various stages, and we have to manage all the domain controllers. Apart from that, we have to back up and monitor the server as well as do everything for the setup. 

It is a very easy process to set up. First, we need to collect all the information, e.g., the custom domain information, user information, and which kinds of applications the users want to access. All this information is needed. Based on that, we can just set up and go to the Azure Portal. We can go to the Azure Active Directory console from there, where we can verify the domain and do the management. It is a very easy process, which is not time-consuming. Though, if you want to design your own application (customize it) and provide access for a particular user or group, then it can be a bit of a time-consuming process.

I don't think more than one or two people are needed for the deployment. If we have all the information, then we can work alone. Not many resources are needed for this.

Azure AD has a good return on investment. We do not need as many servers, electricity, etc. We can save from a cost point of view. Apart from that, if we have a limited set of users, we do not need to go with the extended version of Azure Active Directory, where it costs a lot to enable these services. Azure Active Directory is a good option compared to on-premises. 

This solution is less time-consuming. We don't have to hire as many resources to give permissions to a particular user or group for any application.

We are working with the Premium P2 licenses, which are reasonable. If you invest in the on-premises environment setup, then it costs so much. However, on-prem AD gives you the ability to manage your organization in a very organized manner, where you can create a group policy.

Azure AD provides identity access. If you have to go with the identity part only, then Azure AD would be the better option. If you will go with the various authentication authorization and security services, like group policy setup, then on-prem Active Directory would be better.

It is good service and easy to use.

I would rate the solution as a nine out of 10. They should be improving the solution all the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Azure AD is where our primary user data is stored. We get a feed-in from our HCM solution and it creates our users, and then that's where we store all of their authorizations, group memberships, and other relevant details.

We access it through the Azure Portal.

This product has helped improve our security posture because it allows a tie-in into the Microsoft Azure Sentinel product very easily and seamlessly. From a security standpoint, you have the option of conditional access, the option of identity protection, and those types of things. We have incorporated those right into our offering.

Overall, security-wise, this solution has allowed us to be more flexible. When you had just Active Directory and it was an on-premise solution, you had to do a lot of manipulation to get SaaS products working. You had to do a lot of customizing and those types of things. With Azure Active Directory, it's more configuration than it is customization. This allows us to be a lot more flexible, which brings about efficiency, better security, and other benefits.

Azure Active Directory has also improved our end-user experience.

Before, most companies including ours would use a customized username that would have random characters for a user. This is different from Azure Active Directory, which uses what looks like the email address as your username. In fact, it can be set up as a genuine email address. Where it differs is on the back end, where it has a unique ID, but on the front end, it's more readable and it's better understandable.

From my user experience, the sign-on is seamless as you go through and use any of Microsoft products. Everything ties right into it, and then as you set up your different applications that are tied into Azure Active Directory, and get the single sign-on, everything becomes a whole lot easier to connect into. From a user experience, it's improved it drastically.

For provisioning users, you start by registering an application as either an enterprise application or a custom application. You can set up from within Azure Active Directory how it is that users connect to it. Microsoft has done a great job with providing a lot of application templates that help to connect and add it into the cloud. Almost every application that you could think of is there. From that point, you can set up provisioning.

To assist with provisioning, they have great documentation. From an admin perspective, much of the work is done for you. After the applications are connected to Azure Active Directory, you assign users and groups, provisioning users via API calls, which is how it's done on the back end, and it ties in using service accounts. Then, you can create a group that has the appropriate permissions such as write permission, full admin rights, or contributor rights, and then provision users into those groups. The system automatically handles it for you at that point.

This product is easy to use.

The features that we use day in and day out are single sign-on, group capabilities, and provisioning capabilities. All of these are very useful.

This product has features such as Conditional Access that improve our security posture. Conditional access gives access only through a timeframe. We have certain policies that we set up, which could be a certain amount of time or it could be a certain type of access. These are examples of types of conditional access.

Another example of a security feature that helps us is Identity Protection, which will perform the automatic detection and remediation of risks.

We also have the ability to go in and investigate any risks using data within the portal, and it's all automated. It's nice in that sense.

These features have significantly improved our security posture and time for remediation. It would be difficult to estimate a time improvement in terms of a percentage, but being that it's automated and there is a portal that displays the risks in real-time, it's a very significant change. Previously, we had to go through and look at logs and those types of things, which was time-consuming compared to using the portal.

We also use multi-factor authentication, which is very useful because that gives another layer of security protection for our users. You have to have some sort of device that you can use to provide that second factor, and not just your username and password.

The provisioning capability is a two-edged sword because it is very useful, but it also needs some improvement. When you start to deal with legacy applications, provisioning is not as intuitive. Legacy applications, a lot of times, were based on an on-premise Active Directory and you had to use it to provision users or grant access to the product. I don't know of a way to make Azure Active Directory act as an on-premises version to connect to those legacy applications.

The speed and responsiveness of the technical support are things that could use some improvement.

We have been using Azure Active Directory since October of 2018, nearly three years ago.

The stability is not too bad. It's usually other issues that go on within Microsoft Azure. Whenever Microsoft Azure is down, the Azure Active Directory service sometimes can be down intermittently, depending on where things are at.

It is important to remember that it's not always the Azure Active Directory component that is down. Rather, a lot of the time, there is an app that is tied into Azure Active Directory causing the problem. I think we've had one incident in the last year that was tied directly to Azure Active Directory, where it was down from a SaaS perspective.

This solution scales very well. We were able to tie into our previous company and then bring on all of those users in a very quick amount of time. This included making sure that they could all log in and get access. We haven't really had any issues from that standpoint.

In terms of the users, you can add B2B and you can add B2C, as well. Scalability-wise, it's been good for us. We have between 15,000 and 20,000 users, which is fully scaled at the moment.

We have plans to do further B2B, as we work with our retail partners. We have a lot of retail partners, which is how our business model is structured, and that's something that we're planning on adding and moving forward with.

As far as scaling, going up, or going down, our numbers of Azure Active Directory users are pretty much what they're going to be for the next couple of years. That said, our B2B is definitely going to increase over the same period.

We use Covenant Technology Partners as the first level of technical support. Most of our support tickets actually get escalated from them up to the Microsoft product team.

The Microsoft product team's service is hit or miss, which is something that Microsoft can improve on. They are sometimes slower to react than we would like, but for the most part, they do take our tickets and work on them as they can, to try to figure out ways of remediation.

We did not have any solution prior to this; it was simply an on-premises Active Directory. We were spinning up something brand new to move forward. Being managed saves a lot of time and effort. We migrated our users over from the Active Directory that the prior owners had, but they managed it all, we did not.

It was very easy to get set up and running. Basically, you log into the Azure portal, you have your tenant that you're already connected into, you add a domain and then you just go. You add your first user and then you continue from there.

Our deployment started in October of that year, we had our first users within a week, and then we pretty much provisioned all of our users within a month. It was a pretty quick turnaround.

At the time of deployment, we were in the middle of a divestiture. As such, our implementation strategy included spinning up a brand new Active Directory so that we could start to migrate our users over from our previous owners into a new one that we would control. Consequently, we started from scratch.

I know that a lot of companies are not doing that. Rather, many are starting with an Active Directory and then moving into Azure Active Directory, but for us, it was a clean slate. We then started to incorporate methods of synching with our previous owner so that we could get all of the data from them and continue to march towards a separation.

We brought in consultants only because we didn't have the manpower at the time when we got started. I believe there was one other person besides myself, we were both at the director level, and neither of us had been given the time to build out our teams by that point. The third-party consulting company that we brought in assisted us to help us and assist us in getting everything set up and built out.

The company was Covenant Technology Partners and our experience with them was very good. They were able to help us get everything set up and running right away. Overall, it went very smoothly.

With respect to day-to-day maintenance, we have a lot of it automated. We've tied it into ServiceNow and a lot of our user additions, modifications, deletions, and other operations are things that we have automated via ServiceNow workflow.

I do have a team of three engineers under a manager that currently manages it, but they don't spend any more than probably 5% of their time, daily, dealing with it.

It is difficult to estimate our return when we didn't own anything beforehand. There is no real basis for comparison. That said, the automation capabilities cut down manual provisioning, manual adding, removing, deletion, editing, and those types of things, of user fields. I would say those are the big savings, and it's helpful that you can easily do the automation tie-in into Azure Active Directory.

Anytime you are dealing with Microsoft and licensing, it is always interesting. We have various levels of their licensing, which includes users on different levels of their enterprise offering. For example, some are on E3, whereas others are on E5. The differences between them have to do with the various features that we use.

We're a Microsoft Teams company and we use it not only for collaboration and instant messaging, but we also use it as our phone system. We did all of that together, so when we spun up Azure Active Directory, we also spun out Microsoft teams to use as our phones and flipped off of an old PBX system. It's been very useful but the licensing can be complicated when you get into the retail partners and guests. But for the most part, Microsoft has done a good job of explaining the different levels and what we need and has given us the proper licensing.

There are no additional fees for Azure Active Directory.

We did not evaluate other vendors. Our plan was to implement Microsoft Azure as our cloud solution, as well as go forward with Azure Active Directory. That was the plan from the get-go.

I know that Okta was out there, as well as a couple of other options, but that was never really a consideration for us.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is that because it is a SaaS solution, it's easy to get set up and configured. It doesn't take a lot of overhead to run and quite honestly, the security on it is getting better. Microsoft continues to pump more security features into it.

My advice for anybody who is considering Azure Active Directory is that if you have Microsoft products that you are currently already using, I would definitely recommend it. This is a solution that seamlessly ties into your Office products, and into any Microsoft product, and it's really easy to manage. You can spin it up quickly, implement it, and get going right away. You are able to tie into your on-premise Active Directory as well. At that point, you can start to sync those two to manage all of your users and all of your groups in one place.

Overall, this is a good product and to me it's perfect but at the same time, nothing is perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are a system implementer and this is one of the products that we provide to our clients.

We primarily use this product for identity and access management. Any of our customers using Office 365, which includes Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, are using it for authentication. Worldwide, there are a lot of use cases.

The identity check includes whether the username and password are correct, and it also supports multifactor authentication.

This solution is in the cloud and as soon as users log in to the Office 365 portal, or whatever application you assign to them, it will take care of the identity aspect.

The most valuable features are authentication, authorization, and identity access.

Conditional access is a very important feature where a specific user can be restricted such that they cannot connect to the application if they travel outside of the US.

Multifactor authentication is very important.

They have a velocity check, powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, where if you have been logging in at a location in the US but suddenly you try to log in from a different country, it flags it as an unusual amount of travel in a short time and it will ask you to prove your identity. This is a security feature that assumes it is a phishing attack and is one of the important protections in the product.

The problem with this product is that we have limited control, and can't even see where it is running.  If Microsoft can give us a way to see where this product is running, from a backend perspective, then it would be great.

I would like to see Microsoft continue to add new features gradually, over time, so that we can introduce them to our customers.

We have been using Azure Active Directory for more than six years.

The stability of this product is 100%, and we plan to continue using it.

As this is a cloud-based product, you don't need to worry about scalability. Regardless of the number of users, it handles identity management.

90% of our customers are using it. From what I see, we have up to 50,000 end-users. In reality, we can have up to 400,000.

We can handle most of the issues by ourselves but if not, Microsoft support is available and we just have to create a ticket.

This is the first cloud-based identity management solution that we have used. In an on-premises deployment, we use the traditional Active Directory.

The deployment process involves using the Azure AD Connect tool, which is very important. The only choice that needs to be made beyond this is whether you want to have single sign-on (SSO) enabled or not.

The deployment will require some basic planning. The length of time required will be a maximum of four weeks. Three staff should be sufficient, although this depends on the number of users.

The maintenance of this solution is almost zero. The only time that something needs to be done is in the on-premises portion of a hybrid solution. The cloud aspect is maintained by Microsoft.

As this is a cloud-based solution, less maintenance is required, so the return on investment is better.

The P1 version costs $6 per user per month. If you need the P2 version then it is an extra $3 per month.

There are two different Premium versions of this product available, being P1 and P2. For 99% of our customers, P1 is enough. The P2 version has some advanced features required by a small number of customers.

Overall, my experience with Active Directory has been very good. When we work in the cloud, this product provides us with almost everything.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.