Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

We use the solution for sign-on authentication to our devices.

During the pandemic, we were able to smoothly shift our employees to work from home. Azure Active Directory played a crucial role in ensuring the security of our systems by verifying the identity of the authorized personnel logging in.

We started using Azure Active Directory because it helped our IT administrators and department save time, which was one of the main reasons.

Azure Active Directory saved our organization money.

Azure Active Directory significantly enhanced the user experience for our employees. We observed a notable increase in employee usage and positive communication regarding their experience, particularly after the pandemic.

The two-step authentication is the most valuable.

I would like to have an additional security option to prevent spam.

The price has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The solution is extremely stable.

The solution is highly scalable. We are a school district that is compromised of seven schools. The solution is implemented in multiple locations, and we have over 200 employees and 1,600 students.

The technical support is good. They are always responsive and provide quick resolutions.

Positive

We were using Office 365 but all of the employees started to use their personal emails which affected security so we added Azure AD.

We obtained certification for the deployment of the solution. Microsoft provided a document outlining all the deployment rules and steps, as well as a planning team that provided instructions for all email templates. The deployment required three people.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have seen a return on investment using Azure AD.

We are currently on the education plan, so the price is slightly better than the development plan. However, I believe there is room for even better pricing.

We assessed Google Cloud Identity but ultimately chose Azure AD due to the Microsoft product familiarity among our team. We believed the transition would be smoother, which has been confirmed. Moreover, since not everyone was using Gmail, it would have been challenging for them to learn a new system. However, at that time, everyone in our school was using Microsoft products.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

We have a full-time IT staff and part of their role is to maintain the solution.

Azure AD is an excellent and highly stable product. Its user interface is intuitive for those who have prior experience with Microsoft products. With some training, deployment can be carried out successfully. Our deployment experience was hassle-free, but the pre-training we received proved to be very helpful.

We use it for the single sign-on to different products that we have, and it works pretty well.

In general terms, we use it as an admin tool. If we want to set up accounts for people, it's easier for us to do it like this because everything is connected to different groups.

It's a very intuitive platform. It's easy to create groups and add people.

I have used Okta in the past. Okta is easy to use, and it's also very friendly. Even users who have no tech experience would be able to use Okta.

When it comes to Azure, creating certain things or getting different resources isn't very clear. You need a certain level of knowledge of the system. It could be a little bit more friendly so that some of the things can be done easily, but after everything is created, it's easy to use.

I've been using this solution for five years. In this company, I've been using it for two years, and before that, I used it for about three years.

It's good. It has never hung up.

They're good. We don't have issues with scalability because we are not like Amazon or other companies that are super huge and have got tons of traffic.

I don't handle it directly now, but based on my previous experience, they're pretty fast. I'd rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

There was probably the Google management system, but it works similarly to Azure AD. 

I was not involved in its deployment.

In terms of our environment, it's a private cloud. We have the infrastructure within the platform, but all the software, all the usage, and other things are handled by us. We're private because we're a big company, so we're able to afford it. We're not an IT company, so we don't need so much processing power. So, we use Azure as a PaaS solution.

We use it as a connector for different applications. We have Adobe Sign and applications on AWS. AWS has a translation solution, and people have accounts over there. They have their translations of different products and things like that. That's how we use it.

In terms of maintenance, everything is done by Microsoft. We are just the end users.

The return on investment is easier to calculate with Okta. It's a bit complicated to calculate in the case of Azure. Of course, Azure is already a trusted platform. It's pretty big, and it's handled by Microsoft, so there are no issues with that, but it's easier to check the return on investment with Okta.

I'd recommend Azure Active Directory if you are a big company. For small or medium companies, it's probably not the best idea in the world because of the pricing. If you are a small company, you can probably deploy your own solutions because you're not handling a website with tons of traffic. If you are not like Adidas, Nike, or Walmart, you can do it in a way that is more localized than handling everything through a big price solution. However, Azure tends to provide you with solutions that are easier to use. If it was cheaper, I'd definitely recommend going for it.

I didn't evaluate any other solution. 

I'd rate Azure Active Directory a 10 out of 10.

We are a Microsoft-oriented company. All our main infrastructure for user systems and productivity, like Microsoft Office and email, are from Microsoft. So we use Microsoft products and we use Active Directory on-premises. We have also built a cloud infrastructure and we now have a completely hybrid architecture. As a result, it was mandatory to configure Azure Active Directory to synchronize with the on-premises Active Directory.

We have finished that project and now we use Azure Active Directory for users who are on the cloud.

Entra is very good for the organization because we now have many users, due to COVID, who are working from a distance. With Microsoft, we can give them the opportunity to download all the applications on their personal PCs, like Teams, OneDrive, et cetera. They have a single sign-on and they can log on from everywhere.

The solution has improved things a lot for our organization because it has improved productivity. One specific effect is that we used to use a lot of VPN access, but we have decreased that access by 80 percent because they don't need the VPN anymore. And productivity has also improved very much, because users can do their jobs from everywhere, even on their mobile phones, because they have their files on OneDrive. With Azure Active Directory, we don't have security issues thanks to the added security on the cloud, such as MFA and also Defender for Endpoint. 

But it's not only productivity tools that we have on Azure, we have other applications as well that we have set up for our users, like SAP. We have also diminished our telecom costs.

We have saved a lot of money, I'm very sure about that. We pay for the solution but because it is in the pricing agreement, we have more tools available and we don't have to buy more. I would estimate it has saved us more than 40 percent.

In addition, before, we had to work through all the horizontal firewalls and security sensors in the company. Now, we have separated the productivity tools like Word, Excel, OneDrive, and Teams. That means our users are very pleased with the user experience. They like using it. They can work from home or at the company and their files are synchronized. 

Overall, we feel our security has improved and we are confident.

I like the fact that I can manage the users, but it's also a security resource. Let's say we decide that our users need to have MFA - multi-factor authentication. It is very easy to implement that with Azure Active Directory.

What could be improved is the environment. It still has administration centers in Office 365, and the same is true for Azure in general. You can manage the users from the Office 365 administration center, and you can manage them from Azure Active Directory. Those are two different environments, but they do the same things. They can gather the features in one place, and it might be better if that place were Azure.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for five years.

The stability is very good. We don't have incidents. The only issues we had were to do with synchronization that took some time between Active Directory on-prem and Azure Active Directory. But that might have had something to do with other issues.

It is a 100-percent scalable solution and that is one of the reasons we chose it. 

We have installations on-premises, and people all over the country, including the islands, the north, and everywhere. Our users are in multiple locations. It's used across different departments with different applications and needs. At this moment, we have about 2,300 users.

Microsoft's technical support needs to be improved. It's a bit bureaucratic, to put it in one word.  The procedure for opening a case is that someone sends you an email to give them all they need. I would like the technical support proceedings to be faster. Sometimes, my company doesn't have this time. We need to find a solution very quickly. 

Neutral

We used on-premises products like System Center Configuration Manager. We used Microsoft's products, but for on-prem administration, not on the cloud.

Due to the fact that we have a hybrid architecture, not a clean cloud solution, it took us a lot of time. We had to consider how everything, all the applications, was going to work. Active Directory is also involved in emails and there were many procedures to consider and test. There were also many users who were staying on-prem. We also had to consider external cooperation with other European and domestic energy companies. So it took us about one year. Our company is not a simple company, like a sales company or a manufacturer. We deal with critical infrastructure and we have to control and operate the power for the whole country. We had to think about every step of the journey.

We had 10 to 12 people involved. I was the project manager and there were three groups of people, in addition. One was from telecom and security. There were a few people from infrastructure and technical support, and there were some people from the application side, to test that all our applications were active.

We also have teams for projects, like when we do a large construction for something like power lines. We form teams between departments and these special teams may work for a year on a specific project. We also needed to consider them because they have different needs and work from different places and are mobile.

Because we have on-premises firewalls in our company, we had to do some work before we implemented AAD to arrange access between the company's security system and the Microsoft cloud system so that they could cooperate and communicate. We had to open the protocols, et cetera. As a result, we don't have any problem with the consistency of our security policies.

In the beginning, it was a matter of getting used to the procedures. We needed to explain things to the users so we sent them a guide. We rolled it out to our 2,500 users in many batches over about four months.

There is periodical maintenance, such as upgrades, as well as ad hoc maintenance. For example, if we modify public folders, we need to do some work because, on one occasion, cloud users couldn't see a public folder that was on-premises.

We can see a return on the investment by comparing the prices we know from previous years. We don't use so many data centers now and we don't need as many installations and to pay as much rent.

Our return on investment is that the costs are very small, like one-tenth what they were, by going from owning on-premises data centers to what we have now. Over a period of five years, our return on investment is 100 percent. The money we pay for this contract is not much compared to the money you need for buildings, data centers, power, and technicians.

The price is also very good if you consider the money you save by not having to pay for many contracts with different companies to create a corporate solution. You pay one company, like Microsoft, and you have the whole solution. We have saved a lot of money by doing that. 

Of course, you need to give it time and in-house resources. People have to be trained. Otherwise, if you have many environments and many products that you don't know very well... 

Maybe using multiple companies is good. That's why we do use some other products, but not many.

The price is fair. It's not very expensive given what they offer. Of course, we did some negotiating with Microsoft. We didn't pay the list price. We have been a Microsoft customer for many years, so when the contract comes due every three years, we discuss it. Afterward, there are some discounts.

We evaluated Amazon and Google. We chose Microsoft mainly because it has the whole package, meaning it has the security, the applications, and the infrastructure, so it's a more holistic approach compared to the others. It's not that Google and Amazon don't offer something like that, but they need more time to improve because they were not on-premises companies.

Microsoft gives you the space, the data centers on the cloud, and backups; it gives you everything. From the others, something was always missing. Microsoft may not be perfect, but it has everything you need.

It's a very good solution, an excellent solution. It's very stable and robust. You don't need to do a proof of concept unless you have a special case, like, for example, fleet management, and have a very specialized application.

We use Entra’s Conditional Access feature but we also use other tools from other vendors. From our experience so far, we haven't had problems. Entra seems robust enough. We haven't even had one incident of malware. Of course, we have added some more tools to our cloud infrastructure for the mail applications in the network. So although it's robust enough, because we're handling critical infrastructure, as a company we decided to have more tools.

We use Intune and Endpoint Manager. Any device that is connected, even if it is a personal device, needs to be registered via Intune. We do not accept non-registered devices. 

Azure Active Directory, and Azure in general, is a very big solution that we are developing further. It takes a lot of time, but by using it, we don't need so many other resources from outside companies. We can manage everything in-house. It takes a lot of time, but it's better than other options. It has more tools and better monitoring. Those extra tools mean more time spent on it by the administrators. But it has dashboards that they didn't have before. So the administration is easier and more centralized, but you need time with all these tools.

We use it for access and identity management.

Microsoft Entra ID has improved the way we administer the technology. One strong capability is our ability to use single sign-on. Using identity is an important component of our security, so we have been able to consolidate. Instead of having to manage users for different applications, we use single sign-on. We use Microsoft Entra ID to be the core of identity management across all applications. We have the capability to do so, so it reduces the burden of onboarding, offboarding, and giving different permissions because we have a centralized way to handle that.

Microsoft Entra ID does a pretty good job of providing a single pane of glass for managing user access. For zero trust and the more modern security approaches, it is key to have a single pane of glass. We are able to be very regimented and have processes that are repeatable and reproducible. It provides that consistency, so it is easier to be very consistent.

Microsoft Entra ID has helped to save time for our IT administrators, but I would have a hard time quantifying that. We do not have a lot of users. We are dealing with hundreds of users and not thousands or tens of thousands of users. We are able to use logic and rules to handle most permissioning versus having to do administrative things manually. There is less touch. We touch it only when we have to troubleshoot. If we have a good set of rules, it handles what we need to handle.

The user management groups are valuable. It is a pretty basic product, but user management, in general, is valuable with the ability to differentiate between business lines and add different policies, group-based management, and dynamic user groups.

Allowing for more customization would be very useful. There is a limited metadata capability. When you look at a user, there are only six pieces of information you can see, but organizations are way more complex, so having that metadata available and being able to use that for dynamic user groups and other policies would be very helpful.

We have been using Microsoft Entra ID for six years.

For the most part, it is very stable. I am not worried about its stability.

It is very scalable.

Typically, the people who provide us support want to provide good service, but overall, there is a lot of room for improvement because the subject matter experts basically follow the script, and sometimes, they neglect to listen to what we are asking for. We would have already gone through the steps, and we explain it, but we have to repeat ourselves multiple times.

In my past experiences, I have used Okta and the other ones. In my current organization, I have not used any other solution. When I came in, thankfully, we had Azure AD. We stuck with it, and we made that the primary. It is not perfect for sure, but it works very well in the Microsoft ecosystem. It works well together with Intune and other Microsoft solutions. Because we have a single stack in Microsoft, it works very well with Intune. In the past, I have had different identity and access management, and then you have interoperability issues. Even though Microsoft Entra ID is not perfect, there is less of that. You get one vendor, and usually, things work out eventually.

I was not involved in its deployment in my current organization, but I was spearheaded into bringing from a basic use case to a lot more security and a lot more automation and manageability.

Initially, the initial setup was very basic, and then we modernized it and improved it. We used a lot more policy, and dynamic user groups were a big aspect of that single sign-on in the app management, app registration, and various other aspects.

We took a little bit of external help to make sure that our approach was optimized.

It is difficult to quantify that. Because there is the cost of switching, usually, it ends up being a wash.

Pricing could always be better. You pay the premium for Microsoft. Sometimes, it is worth it, and at other times, you wish to have more licensing options, especially for smaller companies.

We are currently not evaluating other options.

I would rate Microsoft Entra ID an eight out of ten.

There are many use cases. The main use case is identity synchronization to on-prem with AD Connect. Another main use case is related to conditional access. Automated licensing is also one of the use cases. 

It is also used for identity access management with specific workflows, rules, etc. Permission or role management for applications is another use case, but I have never used that in production. I have demonstrated it to multiple customers, but they were not there yet.

The main benefit is that you have one repository for identities. That is very important for main companies. If you have worked with or are familiar with the concepts of on-prem Active Directory, you can easily start with Microsoft Entra ID. You have everything in one area. You have application identities, workload identities, and other identities in one area. It is very convenient and powerful. It helps with centralized identity management. You can also connect with your partner organizations. It is quite powerful for collaboration with your partners, customers, etc.

Microsoft Entra ID provides a single pane of glass for managing user access. It is pretty good in terms of the sign-on experience of users. It is easy to understand for even non-technical people.

With this single pane of glass, we also have a good view of the security part or security policies. From an admin's perspective, we have complete logs of everything that is happening in almost real time. We have pretty much everything we need. In recent times, I have not come across many use cases that could not be covered.

With conditional access, you can make sure that you have control at any time. It is a part of the zero-trust strategy. Any access is verified. You have a very good grasp on identity and devices for compliance. You can manage any issues through Microsoft Entra ID. Most companies I have worked with let you bring your own device, and device management is very important for them. They have a tight grasp on who can connect and which devices can connect to their network or cloud resources.

There have been improvements in the onboarding and the leaving process. It has always been a challenge to make sure that people are given the right access right at the beginning and that their access is disabled at the right moment. Historically, while auditing clients, I could see people who left the company five years ago, but their access was still active. Permission management has been helpful there. It is a nice thing to implement.

In terms of user experience, we have not received any feedback from the users about Microsoft Entra ID, which is good because it means it is transparent to them. It works as expected.

My two preferred features are conditional access and privileged identity management. They are very powerful. I like conditional access a lot. It is an easy way to secure identities.

Privileged identity management helps to control who is requesting access, when, and what for. It gives you a nice overview of what is happening in your tenant and why people are doing certain things. You can easily detect outliers or if something is wrong. 

They can combine conditional access for user actions and application filtering. Currently, they are separated, and we cannot mix the two. I do not know how it would be possible, but it would be interesting.

For permission access, there can be a bit more granular distinction between Microsoft applications. Currently, you have a pack of things, but sometimes, you only want to allow one of the things and not the whole pack. For example, you just want to allow the Azure portal, not the whole experience. However, such scenarios are rare. Overall, I am pretty happy with where we are today. It is always exciting to do new things, but for the customers I have worked with, it covered 99% of the scenarios.

I have been using it since I started using Azure and M365. It has been almost six years.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. I have not met any limitations, but I do not have clients with more than 2,000 users. 

I have used their tech support one or two times. It is pretty good. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have worked a bit with Okta and AWS IAM, but they are more expensive than Microsoft Entra ID. I last worked with Okta about two years ago. At that time, Okta was more advanced and intuitive in certain aspects.

Microsoft Entra ID is a no-brainer if you already do not have a solution and if you have on-prem Active Directory. If you already have something, then the choice can be different. Microsoft Entra ID works for various use cases because you have connectors with pretty much every application on the planet. You have a lot of possibilities to integrate. You can also integrate with on-prem. In terms of security, there are a lot of features to protect your identity. It is quite helpful and appealing, so if you do not have anything and you are going to use Microsoft technologies, it is a no-brainer. Similarly, if you are a cloud company just starting, and if you choose Azure, Microsoft Entra ID is a no-brainer. If you choose another cloud, you can go for another solution.

I have been working with cloud and hybrid deployments. There are a few cloud deployments, but I work a lot with hybrid deployments.

Its setup is straightforward. I am very used to it now, and for me, it is pretty straightforward. The deployment duration depends on the features that you want to enable. Features such as conditional access require discussions with the customers. Generally, two weeks are enough. You might also have to train the internal team on it, which could take a bit more time.

You do not require too many people for deployment. One or two people are normally enough.

In terms of maintenance, it is very easy to maintain. You might have to add another business case for your customers or simplify something you put in place. You have to be aware of the new features, etc.

Microsoft Entra ID must have saved organizations money, but I do not have the data.

Its price is okay. It is easy to go from a P1 to P2 license. It is not exactly a bargain, but I would recommend the P2 license.

Make sure to use MFA and conditional access wherever possible.

Overall, I would rate Microsoft Entra ID a nine out of ten.

We use Azure AD to implement conditional access when using Microsoft Network (MSN) services. Our infrastructure is primarily on-prem, and we operate our email in a hybrid environment and use the solution for continuity between our on-prem and cloud landscapes.

The solution improved our organization, especially in terms of security control. Overall, we're 65-70% satisfied with the product.

The most valuable feature is Conditional Access, and we use it extensively.

Azure AD provides a single pane of glass for managing user access; we integrated multiple APIs and use single sign-on for all of our Microsoft products. I can't speak in universal terms, but we had some positive feedback from our users regarding user experience.  

We use the Conditional Access feature to enforce fine-tuned and adaptive access controls, an excellent feature we use to enhance the security of all the machines connected to our domain. Users cannot access long-term data, data from untrusted devices, or data on connected personal devices.  

We use Azure AD Verified ID, which is a good feature for privacy and control of identity data; it offers a good level of secrecy. 

We've been using the solution for over six years now. 

The product is stable. 

The scalability isn't an issue; it depends on our license.

We previously used Microsoft's technical support, which was excellent; they were very responsive. Now, we use a CSP, and their support is lacking, so I rate them five out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup was straightforward, and a partner was present to assist us during the implementation. We have around 250 users, and the solution doesn't require any maintenance.

The product's price is in the midrange. 

I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Azure AD helped to save some time for our IT admins but not for our HR department, as they don't currently have access to the tool.

I recommend the product to those considering it, though it depends on the use case and requirements. If Azure AD has featured you don't need, then going with one of the cheaper competitors could be a better option.   

We use Office 365 for our emails and Office. As part of that, we have Active Directory on the cloud. We want to safeguard things, keeping in mind the recent upsurge in cyber attacks.

I get a single pane of glass view of all the users. I know who has been registered, who has joined, what their last activity was, and when they logged in. If I extend it, I can purchase Intune from Microsoft and I'll be able to do mobile data management.

Single sign-on is the reason we use AD.

I would like to see a better user interface. Right now, it's not that great. Maybe there could be a dashboard view for Active Directory with some pie or bar charts on who is logged in, who is not logged in, and on the activity of each user for the past few days: whether they're active or not active.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for about a year.

It's definitely stable, a 10 out of 10.

We are a small company so it is scalable, seamlessly. We don't even have 100 users, so we don't have any issues with scalability.

We were previously using Gmail, which didn't have anything of this sort, so we moved to Office 365 which has Azure AD. We have joined the domain controller using Azure AD now.

We were not involved in any deployment. It was automatic. The moment we signed in, we were part of Azure. It was straightforward. We just purchased our license, logged in, and we were automatically onboarded to Active Directory seamlessly.

It doesn't require any maintenance. It's managed by Microsoft.

There is a return on investment for us with Azure AD.

Azure AD comes with Office 365, so we are just paying for the Office 365 license.

We did not evaluate other options because Azure AD seems to be the market leader.

Azure AD is one place where you can manage all users and devices and it's safe and secure.

I have come to depend upon Azure AD as my go-to identity management tool. Almost all businesses today use a Microsoft cloud-based product in some form or another, and integration in Azure AD ensures consistency, compliance, and simplified integration across the enterprise.

Additionally, we use many of the built-in security enhancements and features offered by the solution. Single sign-on and other integrations into a range of line-of-business software applications add to the many use cases available through Azure AD. Along with securely extending the on-premises environment to the hybrid state.

The key improvements to our organization are:

1. A singular control plane is enabling a more efficient administrative process.
2. RBAC simplifies role access providing a simpler approach to zero trust.
3. Onboarding and offboarding extend to every integrated application meaning that compliance is maintained.
4. PIM and PAM: Privileged Identity Management and Privileged Identity Management make controlling access considerably easier and ensure that authorized access is achieved.

With so many features available out of the box, it is difficult to adequately summarise in the space provided here.

I find that integration of enterprise applications outside of Microsoft via OATH and SAML is by far one of the most valuable features as it makes software distribution and access simpler and, with SSO enablement, ensures a lower threat surface from end users.

Azure boasts 90 compliance certifications, and this exceeds that of its competitors. With the compliance manager resource, you can control the company’s compliance tasks from one place.

The tool helps you meet complex compliance obligations. For example, you can undertake continuous risk examinations, provide an outlook on your company’s status and provide opportunities for improvement as needed.

With Azure Advisor and the Secure Score continually assessing your security and compliance posture, there is less need for highly paid security engineers. Especially when considering the size of the Microsoft security operations team also monitoring significant portions of the client environment.

It's really difficult to speak to this. The product is constantly undergoing feature enhancement and enrichment, and anything I would like to see coming is already available for public review.

Azure Active Directory is an easy-to-deploy, robust unified identity and access solution that securely extends your existing on-premise infrastructure to the cloud and provides seamless integration for in-house applications and 3rd party SaaS platforms. Granular policy-driven access controls ensure that access is granted only to authorized identities and devices and from approved locations. Azure AD includes an array of security and compliance options to ensure your business governance is adhered to without impacting productivity.

If I had to pick one, it would be to put the features of P1 and P2 into a single license.

I have been using Azure AD for approximately seven years.

The platform is not without its occasional hiccups, however, in general, it is stable and issue-free.

There are few other identity options available with the scale made available by Azure AD.

Support is hit-and-miss. Some days you'll get someone amazing who has the right knowledge and is willing to go beyond to help. And then there are the other times when help isn't forthcoming.

Neutral

The initial configuration is simple. The configuration process is guided so that even a non-technical person can successfully complete the onboarding.