Entra ID provides a single pane of glass for access management. Microsoft Identity confirms users and the access management grants access. In terms of IT and access management, Entra ID provides better management and monitoring solutions that can be used effectively. Entra ID can be used by IT administrators and app developers. It offers a wide range of options for onboarding applications to the cloud. For example, enabling single sign-on for an on-premises application can be time-consuming. However, moving the application to Entra ID is straightforward. App developers can use Entra ID APIs to build personalized experiences, set up single sign-on, customize applications, and monitor them. The single pane of glass consistency for user sign-on experience is very good because Entra ID is a solution from Microsoft that is available in different regions around the globe. This means that we always have better visibility and management of user sign-on, and now Microsoft apps also moved to Microsoft Entra. This provides a unified experience where we can manage access and permissions from a single location. The consistency of our security policy is excellent. It is very granular, allowing us to scope it to groups or access it via the API. We also have Entra ID PIM, which allows us to granularly control access to resources. This is a very good option for access management. Active Directory's Admin Center is a very good tool for managing all identity and access tasks in our organization. It provides a single pane of glass for managing users, groups, external identities, and roles. It also allows us to create administrative units, which can be used to scope access to a set of users, groups, and devices. We can also use Admin Center to view licenses, company branding, user settings, security settings, sign-in logs, provisioning logs, usage, and insights. Admin Center also makes it easy for admins to troubleshoot problems. For example, if we need to debug something, we can log into Admin Center and check the sign-in logs. There were many benefits to moving to Entra ID. The main benefit was that it was a game-changer, especially for monitoring. When we were using Active Directory, everything was local. This meant that we had to build our own monitoring solution for each application that was onboarded into AD. This was a time-consuming and expensive process. With Entra ID, we can use Microsoft Sentinel or Entra ID Monitor to monitor all of our applications from a single location. This is a huge time and cost savings. Another benefit of Entra ID is that it makes it easy to onboard new applications. With AD, we had to deploy the application on-premises and then configure IT and access management. This was a complex and time-consuming process. With Entra ID, we can simply onboard the application and then grant Identity Access Management to the application. This is a much simpler and faster process. Conditional access is a powerful feature that allows us to define a set of conditions that must be met in order for users to access our applications. This can help us to improve security by ensuring that only authorized users can access our data, regardless of where they are or what device they use. For example, we could create a policy that requires users to be located in a specific country or to use a specific device type in order to access our applications. We could also require users to use multi-factor authentication in order to access our applications. Conditional access policies can be applied to all of our applications, including those in Entra ID and Office 365. Conditional access policy plays a key role in zero trust security. In the conditional access policy, there is a feature called named locations, which allows us to exclude devices from a condition if they are coming from a trusted location. For example, if we add an exclusion for trusted locations to our conditional access policy, it will directly impact our zero trust policy. The main driver for any organization to move to zero trust security is to reduce the number of named locations in their conditional access policies. By reducing the number of named locations, we can increase the security of our organization by making it more difficult for attackers to gain access to our systems. I have been using the conditional access feature in conjunction with the endpoint manager for a long time. This is a great feature because it helps us to monitor threats and direct users accordingly. It is a very useful feature for monitoring our endpoints. For example, if a user tries to access a service, the check can be done and the endpoint manager will be able to provide us with all the findings. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can identify any PaaS devices that connect to a network. This includes any unpacked devices that are trying to use an application that is onboarded in Entra ID or any persistent Office 365 application, such as Microsoft Teams, Outlook, or OneDrive. I have been using Entra Verified ID on the proof of concept. It is one of the best ways to onboard a remote employee. Since COVID in 2020, we have all been working remotely. It is better to onboard an employee who is present remotely in a different location than to ask them to come to the office, collect a laptop, and then onboard them. Verified ID makes this process easier by using preset, already-known information that is present in our company directory. For example, when an employee is interviewed, they are given face verification through a government ID. The ID is collected and a photograph is taken, which is then stored in the HR database. With this information, we can onboard employees remotely and grant them access to all of the company's resources. This is a much easier option than asking everyone to come to the office and ask for help from the overloaded service desk team. The speed at which we can onboard a remote employee depends on how we define it in the initial planning. If we set the correct standards, such as the type of information we need to verify the employee's identity, we can streamline the process. For example, if we require the employee to provide a government ID and a photograph, the HR department can collect this information in advance and process it in the company's database. This will make it easier for the employee to complete the onboarding process remotely. When it comes to controlling and prioritizing the privacy of identity data, there are multiple ways to do so. One way is to onboard remote employees with information that is already present in the company directory. This information can be verified by HR, who has already obtained the employee's consent to share their personal information. Another way to onboard remote employees is to ask them to provide a photo and government ID. This information is also stored in the company's database and is not shared with Microsoft. Microsoft only creates a digital identity for the employee and uses this identity to validate the employee's remote onboarding. In both cases, the employee's personal information is not exposed to the Internet. Microsoft and the company have a secure channel for exchanging this information, so there is no problem with data privacy. The permission manager in Entra ID is very good. Microsoft improved it a lot. Microsoft Entra is the new permission manager solution. It provides comprehensive visibility into the permissions assigned to all identities, such as user identities. It also allows us to check the current permissions that are given to users. This is a better way to manage permissions. Permission management is a really good option that has a lot of benefits and improvements, especially when moving to the Microsoft enterprise. When it comes to identity and permission management, the risk is relatively low when using a cloud-managed solution. This is because cloud-managed solutions provide full visibility and the option to automate permission management. One of the benefits of cloud-managed identity and permission management is that it allows us to implement the principle of least privileges. This means that we can give users and workloads only the permissions they need to do their jobs. This helps to reduce our attack surface and makes it more difficult for attackers to gain access to our systems. Another benefit of cloud-managed identity and permission management is that it provides us with visibility into our user and workload identities. This allows us to quickly identify and remediate any security issues that may arise. Entra ID helps our IT administrators and HR department save time. It reduces the custom task of deploying and onboarding any application. This means that administrators can easily onboard applications to Entra ID and provide users with a single sign-on experience. As a result, administrators have more time to focus on improving their skills and deploying new Entra ID features. Entra IDoffers a wide range of features, including artificial intelligence capabilities such as Chat GPT. This frees up a lot of time that was previously spent managing the local active directory. Entra ID has freed up most of my weekends. When I was previously working with on-premises data centers, I had to patch my servers every weekend, which was a time-consuming and tedious task. However, now that all of my applications have been moved to Entra ID, these tasks have been drastically reduced. As a result, I would say that my weekends are now almost free. Entra ID saved lot of organization money. I see previously organizations investing in expensive solutions for data centers, which required a lot of maintenance and the need to find the right talent to manage them. However, with Microsoft Entra ID, we no longer have to worry about maintaining data centers, as they are completely managed by the cloud. This has made our operations easier and more efficient, as we can now deploy changes quickly and easil...
