Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

Our use case depends on the client, their project, and what they want to deploy. 

1. The solution can be deployed for security purposes. Multi-factor authentication is being deployed as a second layer of authentication, especially during this COVID-19 time, because everything has to stay secure. 
2. Almost every organization uses the software as a service (SaaS) part. Because of the pandemic right now, a lot of companies are moving many things to the cloud, like virtual machines (VMs) and virtual networks. It doesn't invalidate the fact that some companies don't want to have control on-premises. 

Everything depends on the solution or what the client wants.

We use it for PaaS and IaaS.

In terms of identity management, it helps to improve security posture. It generally helps in terms cloud security, simplicity, and single sign-on for multiple apps.

In terms of improvement, there should be more flexibility and conditional access. There is a lot of flexibility already, but there are some technologies that should be embedded and integrated into it for a more flexible, customized experience. Also, there should be more tools for analysis for clients, e.g., there should be more flexibility aimed at end users. Regular IT guys for each company should be able to use the tools to troubleshoot a certain level of analysis in their environment.

The security part should be improved overall. 

The visibility in the GUI is not good for management. There are a lot of improvements that could make it better. It should be more user-friendly overall. It is not user-friendly because everything keeps changing on the platform. I can understand it because I know the platform,  am familiar with it, and use it every day. However, for a lot of clients, they don't use it every day or are not familiar with it, so it should be more user friendly.

I have been using it for four to five years.

Availability for Azure AD as a whole is 99.95 percent. It is simpler and more available than the way technology used to be previously.

It is very scalable. When you talk about licensing, you have the option to scale up or scale down. For example, you purchase 50 seats of licenses and assign 45 licenses, then for some reason, you fire 10 employees. Once you fire them, you will probably block their identity access and single sign-in. After that, you can decide to reduce the number of licenses. On the other hand, if you acquire 10 licenses and employ five new people, then you can scale up by adding more five licenses that month. So, it helps you to scale up or scale down easily.

In another example, if you have acquired five virtual machine instances, then are using more in terms of the processor, you can scale up. It depends on the configuration you have. If you have done the setup and everything from the beginning, then you can say, "If the processor level reaches 80 percent, you want to add another two virtual machine instances." On the other hand, if you deployed five virtual machine instances, but your usage of those processors is lower than 30 percent, then you should scale down. So, if you have five licenses and you want to scale down by one, then you can scale it down so you can reduce your costs.

I would rate the technical support as a nine out of 10.

When I set it up two years ago, it was easy, not complex. It didn't take much time at all to set up.

A lot of people sign in or set it up with a Google account, Yahoo account, or Microsoft account, which is not the global administrator. A lot of people think that this is the global administrator. They don't understand that the account might have an extension and don't see this until that account gets locked out. That is when they have problems signing in. The setup is not that complex. It is just that the user experience overall needs improvement here.

The deployment process depends on what you are trying to achieve and the technology that you are trying to deploy, e.g., are you trying to deploy SSO, set up device writeback, or do a regular AD Connect setup? Everything depends on the objective or the overall goals of what you want to achieve.

Even after it has been deployed, one or two users may have problems with their account in terms of multi-factor authentication or the way it has been set up. I work with them to troubleshoot these issues.

Sometimes, the priority is to set up AD Connect, which integrates your on-premises to Active Directory. You must make sure your server is up and running. Apart from that, you need to set up your tenant, which is your profile admin center. 

If they want to download and install their tools, then we can connect to their on-premises for synchronization. So, it helps collect on-premises data and put it into the cloud. 

You can also install PowerShell. 

Everything needs to be considered for the requirements and if it is within the budget, then you can come up with a solution, whether it is SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS. 

Since people might not be very familiar with the platform, I have developed a system for how to use, deploy, or utilize the technology.

At the end of the day, it is about the overall goal because everything comes with a cost. Azure AD comes in different ways and shapes, e.g., SaaS is different from IaaS or PaaS, though it is still the same platform. 

Whether you are a small business or large business, you can always enjoy a very secure cloud platform. 

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

When we are deploying cloud applications we avail ourselves of the services of Azure AD. At the moment, we are mostly getting the data from on-premises to the cloud, as far as user entities go. We're trying to define policies based upon the company's and our projects' requirements, such as whether we need to make something public or private. This all has to be defined. We also use it for access management.

We have protected the entire tenant itself, as a federation. AAD has also become a great source of research.

Previously there were many tenants and many subscriptions within each tenant. We have been able to separate Office 365 as a separate tenant and not welcome any other applications into that. We are only using SaaS with that tenant. Later, we had different tenants, and we welcomed all types of PaaS and IaaS.

Recently, managed identities came into the market, and we are trying to adhere to automations and customization, the automation of groups, which is a major advantage. That way, people don't have to wait for a long time for manual intervention. If they raise a ticket, within a few minutes the answer can be in their mailbox with all the details.

The features I normally use are for authentication and authorization.

Single sign-on provides flexibility and helps because users don't want to remember so many passwords when logging in. It's a major feature. Once you log in, you have access to all the applications. It also enables us to provide backend access controls to our users, especially when it comes to groups, as we are trying to normalize things.

For the end-users, they can seamlessly log in to their web products, like their Outlook account. They have YAML services and SharePoint services. Everything is single sign-on and that makes them happy.

An area where there is room for improvement is the ease of use of the dashboards.

Also, if a user is working in India, and we suddenly see a login from the US, Australia, or New Zealand, we should be alerted, because we wouldn't expect that application would be used by that user in those locations at that time.

An area for improvement is that there is so much dependence on on-premises databases, in the on-premises directory services.

In terms of features we would like to see, we don't have domain controllers in Azure AD. We are also looking at how we can best migrate users from on-premises to Azure AD, and how we can welcome B2B users. We would like to see improvement in the B2B functionality. We hope that is already in the roadmap. We'd also like to see some functionality for how we can set boundaries for tenants. We have multiple tenants that we're trying to consolidate. It's definitely going to be a big challenge to consolidate two tenants, so we're looking for help in that area.

I have been using Azure AD for the last three years.

In terms of the solution's availability, I haven't seen anything negative. It's always available. There have been no issues.

I haven't seen any room for improving the scalability or performance. The capacity is good. We are managing about 5,000 users in Azure AD. We have an Ops team and there are about 10 people who maintain and manage users and groups for the production tenant. But in five months, with SaaS and PaaS services, that might go higher.

We have had many discussions with tech support for Azure AD. We are trying to install read-only domain controllers or ODCs into the cloud platform. We have had many challenges with that in terms of the network side and the business requirements. Another issue we have spoken with them about is how to do automation of service principles and of groups.

Support has been great, but there is a little room for improvement. We have had to go through many iterations and we have had to wait for a long time until the next version of the solution comes out. Overall, we get good support, but their timelines could be better.

We were using Microsoft AD, on-premises. We are now syncing all the users who are in the on-premises version to Azure AD. We are not directly creating users in Azure AD because of the dependencies. Many legacy applications are talking to the on-premises directory services. When a user is created, we are sending that user from the on-premises to the cloud through Azure AD Connect.

We are using the Premium P2 licensing. 

To explore the solution, I had to create a personal version, because I can't play with the access that we get from the company. We explore those services in the personal version first, to see how it reacts.

From the company side, we haven't had issues because the licensing works well. But on a personal level, if I could enable more trial services, at least for a year, it would be much easier to explore and suggest the best solutions.

It's an easy tool to explore if you have already worked with the on-premises data services. There is good documentation available on the Microsoft website. If Microsoft provided more time for new users to explore new features, that would help. Everyone could learn more and contribute more to their companies or to the projects that they're working on. But it is easy to learn.

Just be careful, because you are in the cloud. You have to be aware of access, AM, how the user is coming into their account, where the user is going and what the user actions are, and what access they have. Always try to enable single sign-on, so that if any fraudulent user comes into the picture, you can remove them as soon as possible. So enable those features for admin accounts and use privileged IT management, vaulting the password. You have to strictly follow the security standards, because it's open to the public when it is on the cloud. You have to be very careful about the project requirements, the end-user requirements, and what the business stakeholders need.

When we started with Azure AD, we didn't restrict much. Later, we restricted a few possibilities, such as users logging in with their social accounts, or email accounts like Yahoo accounts or Outlook. Initially it was open to all. Any user could invite a guest user and provide access, but later we restricted things with conditional management, and restricted users so that they could not connect to their Gmail accounts. We are coming up with more policies as well.

We have ongoing discussions with Microsoft Azure AD regarding how we can best protect our entities and what the behaviors should be. We have some more specific requirements in the company, related to project behavior. With IaaS, you have to welcome everyone. You have to put virtual machines in the cloud. You can use the password services and develop custom APIs and deploy them. 

We are trying to define our security policies as much as we can, as we are seeing many changes in the market and are trying to restrict as much as we can. Only users who are least privileged can have an all-access. The most privileged will have additional authentication. We're trying to differentiate.

We have to be very careful about the administrative part, so that operations can easily manage without any hassle. Because we don't have natural restrictions, we are trying to implement our own rules.

As we are moving to the cloud, we have to be very careful when it comes to Azure Active Directory. If there is a mistake and a random user can log in to the directory, they could have access to everything. A user should not have access to whatever he wants, so setting up the right level of authentication and authorization is important. Use IAM very effectively. Identity and access management is a powerful space where one has to be very careful in choosing and configuring policies and standard procedures. We're trying to define that and be careful when with all platforms, whether IaaS, SaaS, or PaaS. At the moment it's going well.

We are merging many things in the tenant. Before, we only had SaaS. We are trying to welcome PaaS and IaaS to use the same production tenant. We have to exercise caution for everyone, all the individual policies, groups, and service principles. We have to enable all the features that you are capable of, such as user sign-in permissions, and application sign-ins. That has to be continuously monitored.

We have a good rapport with Microsoft. We have good support. We'll be exploring all the new services, like the managed entities and their other services that have come up. We are trying our best to explore and use the latest features that are available.

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.

Azure AD helps us manage application and hybrid identities.

I like Azure AD's conditional access policies. Microsoft Entra provides a single pane of glass for managing user access, improving the overall user experience. 

The workflow management for registering new applications and users could be improved.

I have used Azure AD for about eight years.

Azure AD is stable.

Azure AD is scalable. 

Azure AD is so stable and easy to administer that we don't need to contact support. 

Setting up Azure AD is straightforward. 

I rate Azure Active Directory a nine out of ten. You should use premium licenses or Azure directly whenever possible to take advantage of the new security features since E3. 

It gives us security when integrating all the Active Directories of all our branches together, giving us a centralized database and authentication.

It has helped save time for our IT administrators. It's seamless for the users because they simply log into the stations, but it's affecting the response time and efficiency of the IT team.

Active Directory itself is the best feature it has. It also gives us a single pane of glass for managing user access.

I have been working with Azure Active Directory for almost a year.

So far, it has been a stable solution.

It is scalable.

We did not have a previous solution.

I am working right now on whether we have seen ROI from the solution.

We are always looking for better pricing. Our agreement is on a monthly basis.

We're planning to use conditional access to access controls, but we have not done so in the meantime.

The solution doesn't require much maintenance; we're talking about two or three people.

I set up Azure Active Directory for many customers of the company I work for. I'm an implementer. It is the basis of identity and access for all the tenants we are using for our customers.

Microsoft Entra helps our clients save a lot of time, especially with the many automation processes that we can leverage to facilitate our work. The amount of time saved depends on the customer's needs. In general, on average I would estimate it saves them 40 percent in terms of time. But in some cases, it could be up to 70 percent.

It also helps them save money because they can work with fewer employees, or they don't have to hire more employees to do tasks that can be automated.

Another benefit is that it provides satisfaction at the administration level. On the user level, the ease of use makes it easy to understand without any limitations.

And it provides quite a good level of security for all users.

All the features of the solution are helpful. Among them, one of the most important is the Conditional Access. It helps affect a Zero Trust strategy positively.

Also, I use Entra Permission Management to distribute the roles among all users according to management requests. Microsoft provides reports for visibility and all kinds of controls where you can see the users and their access. Permission Management helps reduce the risk surface when it comes to identity permissions. It supports adaptive controls and that helps me in defining the right controls for users.

I would like them to improve the dashboard by presenting the raw data in a more visual way for the logs and events. That would help us understand the reports better.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for about three years.

It's stable. I haven't experienced any downtime or breakdowns with the product.

It's scalable.

I'm satisfied with their support. 

Neutral

It's easy to set up. 

The amount of time needed to set up Azure Active Directory depends on each customer's use case. It will take at least three to four hours for a small organization, and in that scenario you wouldn't need more than one person to set it up. For larger organizations, it may take a week and we would need two to three persons.

Our customers are looking for advanced features and processes for it to be cost-effective for their organizations. They see it as an overpriced product. They are enjoying using Azure Active Directory, but they are looking for better prices.

Just follow the book.

We had the need to integrate the solution that we had on-premise and the email-based identities, so we looked for a solution from the same provider that could establish us and provide a synchronized identity (what we know today as SSO) in our resources and thus be able to log in with the same identities we had on-premise and in the cloud. 

We wanted to take advantage of that synchronized identity quickly, simply, and safely. It was important to understand that users today want to have a single password for all resources, be they applications, or devices, in order to help them so that they are not constantly learning different credentials and can thus be faster and more efficient when establishing a single login.

It has given us the ability to be able to establish single sign-on identities in which we can establish credentials no matter where we are, whether it is on-premises or in the cloud, in a hybrid cloud, or in an additional connection from another cloud where we share equipment or host. 

Additionally, we enabled more protection functions so that it is well protected even though it is a single credential for each environment and established for any environment it could be safely protected.

Its most outstanding feature is the ability to integrate, segment, establish, add and configure an identity for multiple domains in different regions, locations, or types of clouds. It is one of the hybrid solutions that can be used the most to establish an entity configuration in multiple environments. It is a tool that has given us the ability to establish identity security issues to share and perimeter segment the security of an organization, a domain, and multiple clouds in a fast, simple, and well-established way, which has allowed us to be more efficient.

I want to see new functionalities for the active directory. I would like to be able to establish that when you log into computers locally, it is installed on a laptop and you can enable the MFA feature that is currently not available for local computers or Windows on-or off-premise - thus being one of the characteristics that can give greater added value to information security issues. 

If this feature was available on computers, it would help us in the future to avoid security breaches, information loss, or data backup vulnerabilities. In many cases, this could generate a complication. However, we always want to innovate, and the Innovation part is always to ensure that any place, device, or management that we are going to establish at the computational level is 100% secure.

We've used the solution for one year and two months.

We primarily use the solution for MFA; to access apps such as Teams or Outlook, two-factor authentication with our mobile phones is required.

We also use Authenticator to assist our clients with re-enrolling, moving, and adding new devices. 

The solution helps us keep our data secure and prevents security breaches, malware, etc. The app also provides us with options regarding our authentication preferences.

The two-factor authentication provides an additional layer of security for our organizational data, so Microsoft Authenticator plays a crucial role in making our confidential data more secure.

The solution offers multiple authentication methods via text, call, or the app. This gives us many options and flexibility when it comes to MFA.

Our users sometimes experience issues from having multiple Microsoft accounts, which can cause some confusion and hassle.

It would be good to see the incorporation of fingerprints and Face IDs as authentication options. This would simplify the authentication process for end users, especially those who aren't as tech-savvy. It is also a consideration for visually impaired people, for example.

We have been using the solution for about one and a half years. 

Microsoft Authenticator is a very stable application; our only issue is that we run into the occasional bug.

The solution is highly scalable. Many organizations use it around the world. 

The technical support is very good. 

Positive

I used PingID when working for another organization, which is slightly different from Microsoft Authenticator.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but the solution is straightforward to use once installed. 

The solution requires a little maintenance, as we sometimes encounter bugs where the app doesn't recognize a user account, for example.

I am not involved in the pricing or licensing, so I can't speak to that. 

I would rate the solution a 10 out of 10.

I would advise potential users to familiarize themselves with the basics of the solution; how to set up an account, how to use the app etc. It's always a good idea to have a clear reason for using a particular solution, how it functions, and what role it fulfills.