Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

We used Azure AD for a role-based customer access mechanism. We implemented a single tenant, single sign-on for users of the application. We gave them a sign-on feature with OpenID Connect.

Previously we had to manually create the authentication server, but when we used Azure AD, we got the server directly from Azure. I didn't have to design the server.

We were also able to filter on the domain for the client I was working for.

In addition, we used Azure AD's Conditional Access feature to enforce fine-tuned and adaptive access controls. That was pretty useful because we didn't have to do much because we had attributes like authorized tags. And we configured scope, meaning who can access what, in the manifest. It was not very complicated.

And Azure ID has definitely helped save us time. Earlier, we had to depend on the infrastructure team, a different team, to manage the Active Directory permissions. But now, most of the time, the developers have access in the portal. It is saving us about 40 percent of our time.

The most valuable features of Azure ID are the single sign-on and OpenID Connect authentication.

Also, it was very nice that the documentation, the articles and help, on how to implement what we were trying to do, were available freely on the site, making it easy to develop. We did two or three sprints because things worked. Most of the time was spent on development and testing. But the deployment was easy.

Maybe I don't have enough experience, but when you fix the rules and permissions, working directly on the manifest, you really need to have in-depth knowledge. If there were a graphical user interface to update the manifest, that would be good. For example, if I want to grant access to HR versus an admin, I have to specifically write that in the manifest file to create the various roles. That means I'm coding in the manifest file. A graphical user interface would really help.

I have been using Azure AD for two-plus years.

The stability is 95 percent. We don't have any issues with it.

Of course it's scalable and that's why we choose the platform. We only have two regions in the load balancer. We have not gone beyond that, so we have not faced an issue.

We deployed it in multiple locations for our customer.

We haven't contacted Microsoft support.

I have played a small role in deploying Azure AD, but I have not been involved in the migration process. Overall, the deployment is easy. It took us 20 to 25 days, including fixing issues. That was normal, nothing unusual.

Regarding maintenance, the team I'm on does application maintenance. For Azure, we have a cloud admin who looks at the Azure portal for things like billing, access management, and admin work.

Some people use SAML technology for single sign-on. Although I haven't used it, it seems a bit complex. I started working directly with Azure AD OpenID Connect to a single tenant, or Azure AD B2B or B2C, and it was very smooth. It was not much of a challenge. Most of the complex things are taken care of by the Azure AD login. Usually, you don't need to do a deep dive into what is happening internally. 

Microsoft is like a "hovercraft", as opposed to scuba diving. With Microsoft, you can use the "hovercraft". Without touching the river you can cross it.

I have not explored many other competitive products, like GCP or AWS. I am a supporter of Microsoft products.

With Verified ID, things were secure. In recent news, there has been some hacking due to some developer using an email ID as opposed to OpenID, but our team did not use email IDs. Even if we were using email IDs for single sign-on, the user still needed to sign up with a password, so it was not possible to impersonate someone else.

The user experience, the interface, is very smooth. We have never had any problems with the single sign-on.

When applications are hosted on Azure, you should use the advantages of Azure AD.

We are a university using Azure AD to authenticate staff, faculty, and students. Our organization completely depends on Azure Active Directory for authentication and identity-related features. All cloud activities and third-party services are validated with Azure Active Directory.

We also have an on-premises Active Directory, and the data is synced periodically to the cloud. Most of the services done on-premises are reflected in the cloud at once. We can also do the same handling features from the cloud to write back to the on-premises AD. This is the architecture.

We are implementing more and more services in the cloud on Azure and AWS, so we need to monitor our data security thoroughly. It's always a concern. Azure Active Directory enables us to easily validate the identity of anyone who connects to a particular server. We need to validate our data properly. For example, we must ensure our research data is going to the right person and place. Microsoft Azure Active Directory provides the easiest way to do that.

The Conditional Access feature lets us restrict access to a group of people on specific servers. We create a group in the Azure Active Directory and put only the necessary members there. For example, we can easily set up conditional access to SSH, Telnet, SSH, HTTPS, or any service with Azure Active Directory. 

We plan to implement Zero Trust in many of our other devices. It is an essential feature because users from multiple countries are accessing our research servers. We can provide a highly secure environment with minimum services without compromising productivity with a Zero Trust strategy.

We have wireless units deployed across the campus and use Microsoft AD services to authenticate all wireless activities. Many of the use cases are covered by wireless. After authentication, some users need to be redirected to the cloud. Their identities can be easily validated and captured with Microsoft AD. It gives us excellent control over our on-premise infrastructure.

Verified ID has helped us with our remote workforce. We provide VPNs to our remote employees so they can connect to our cloud services, authenticate with Azure, and be granted the necessary access. We provide policies for each user basis. Users in each category connect to the VPN, authenticate with their Azure credentials, and securely access all the cloud services.

We give provisioned laptops to our remote employees. With the help of this VPN, they spend less time coming to work in person because they have full-time access from home. So that way, we could reduce most of our official requirements concerning our employees. 

Privacy is a crucial security concern for our organization. With Verified ID, we can ideally authenticate Microsoft services without worrying about compromised identities. We used to have these issues with on-premise Active Directory, but this is less of a problem since we migrated to Azure Active Directory.

Our HR department can easily get a complete report on our users. HR can see specific fields, like designation, school, businesses, etc., if they need it from the Azure AD. They can also get the usage logs. They don't need to store all this manually for each person. They can easily get all the reporting parameters from this.

Azure AD saves us a lot of time. On any given day, it will save around four hours. It also saves us money because we don't need to pay for the resources required to have Active Directory on-premises. If we relied on on-premises Active Directory, it would require data center resources, like air-conditioning, power,  hardware, etc. We save considerable money by deploying it on the cloud. Percentage-wise, I think we could save around 40 percent. 

Azure Active Directory has improved our overall user experience. I would rate it a nine out of ten. Our users are delighted.

Azure Active Directory's single sign-on feature has been helpful because users don't need to authenticate again and again each time they access it. Users only need to sign in the first time, and Azure handles everything. We haven't experienced any errors or security-related issues in the past four years. Many people use our protection servers from outside, requiring multi-factor authentication. Each authentication is logged precisely.

In addition to the SSO, Azure AD is entirely flexible. We have other Microsoft services running on-premises, so Microsoft Azure AD allows us to sync other Microsoft services completely. This is perfect for us.

Microsoft Entra offers a single pane of glass for managing users and cloud services on multiple platforms. It all requires authentication and validation of user data, so Azure AD helps us to authenticate each user's identity without any security compromises. 

Microsoft has an excellent administration portal that enables us to sync our on-premise Active Directory automatically with the cloud. Any on-premise policy changes are reflected on the cloud. There are various options for each user on the admin portal. You can change user passwords and other attributes or configure a policy for forgotten passwords. A writeback feature can also reflect changes from the cloud to the on-premise environment. If you change the password from the cloud admin center, it gets reflected here.

Microsoft Azure AD Connect has a multi-factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication is a crucial feature, but we only require MFA for specific servers in the cloud. With Microsoft Azure AD Connect, we can specify the users and servers that require multi-factor authentication.

Azure Active Directory integrates well with other third-party applications. Third-party hosted solutions have the option. We can even create applications with Microsoft Azure AD. When users log in to Microsoft Azure AD, their credentials are stored in the application, and we don't need to get them on-premise Active Directory. So, it is an essential feature for us.

Microsoft services and most familiar third-party applications are currently supported, but we can't find many other platforms that integrate with Office 365 or Azure Active Directory. Microsoft should develop connectors for different applications and collaborate more with other vendors to cover a broader range of applications.

We have been using Azure Active Directory for four years. 

Microsoft services have a reputation for complete reliability, so we expect the same from Microsoft Azure AD. It doesn't disappoint because most of the on-premise features extend to the cloud. Plus, Microsoft Azure AD has additional features, configuration, and single sign-on capabilities. It's a complete package for this authentication and validation purpose. Most of our users are pretty happy with this product.

Azure AD is completely scalable. We can add unlimited users.

I rate Microsoft's support a ten out of ten. Microsoft technical support is excellent

Positive

Previously, we have used on-premise Active Directory.

Setting up Azure Active Directory was a bit complex. The migration process is somewhat challenging because we don't want to lose any on-premise data. Each user has many parameters and access policies already set. Without even changing the password, we were able to sync all this data to Microsoft Azure AD. It was a complex procedure because Azure AD Connect has to be deployed correctly. We required help from Microsoft's technical support to do this.

Our initial deployment required three system admins and took around one week, but it took around six months to import all our users and get everything working properly. After deployment, Azure AD doesn't require any maintenance because everything happens in the cloud. We don't need to bother with anything.

The return on investment is pretty massive. We save time and money. It helps us even if we opt for a subscription. We save a considerable amount of time with the cloud version because it has various features unavailable in the on-premises Active Directory that save time for the system administrators. We can concentrate resources on hiring other staff instead of system administrators. All the features are within the cloud itself, so it reduces the maintenance costs of an on-premise server. 

Active Directory is bundled with a package of Microsoft services, so it doesn't cost much. I don't know about the individual license of Active Directory. 

I rate Azure Active Directory a ten out of ten. I would prefer Azure AD to have multiple application scenarios requiring a single sign-on facility and complete authentication, validation, and security tracking. 

If they require it in their application, even if it is an on-premise or a host application, I would prefer Microsoft Azure AD because it handles all this simultaneously. No other application covers a complete range of activities in an all-in-one solution. 

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.

Azure AD manages the identities of all our employees. 

Azure AD allowed us to get rid of servers and other hardware that run at our offices. We moved everything to the cloud. Once we set up roles and permissions, it's only a matter of adding people and removing people from different groups and letting permissions flow through. 

It also saved us some money. Our IT group is tiny, so any automation we can do is valuable. We haven't had to grow the team beyond three. The employee reaction to Microsoft Entra has been positive. People like to have a single credential for accessing all our Microsoft and non-Microsoft apps.

I like Azure AD's single sign-on and identity federation features. It allows us to issue a single credential to every employee and not worry about managing a lot of passwords. Microsoft Entra provides a single pane of glass for managing user access, and we're pleased with it.

Entra's conditional access feature enables us to set policies up based on the location and risk score of the account and the device they use to access the network. Permission management lets us assign roles for various Azure functions based on functions people perform in the company. It helps us bundle access to different things by associating it with a given role at the company.

I would like to see a better delegation of access. For instance, we want to allow different groups within the company to manage different elements of Azure AD, but I need more granularity in delegating access.

We've been using Azure AD for 10 years.

I rate Azure AD nine out of ten for stability. They've had issues in the past, but it's been quite some time. It has been nearly two years since the last availability problem.

We only have 100 employees at the company, so we're nowhere near the maximum limits. I know of a massive company that adopted Azure AD. I imagine it's scalable well beyond the size of our company.

The support is decent. I always manage to find what I'm looking for. If it's not in the documentation, there are lots of blog posts that third parties have written, and I always seem to find what I need. I rate Microsoft support nine out of ten. 

Positive

We used the on-premises version of Active Directory, but we switched to the cloud to get rid of all of our hardware. We don't run any servers in the officer anymore. 

Setting up Azure AD was straightforward. It's all delivered online, so it's only a matter of filling in the parameters for our organization. After that point, it scales easily.

There's no traditional maintenance. We have to perform audits on accounts to ensure that people and permissions are still online. There isn't product or data maintenance. 

Azure AD is essential to how the business runs. We're only investing more in the whole Microsoft Suite.

We're a Microsoft partner, so we get partner benefits. We pay almost nothing, and it's massively valuable to us.

We didn't look at anything else because we're committed to Office 365, and we need to be on Active Directory for Office 365. It's a well-known, trusted solution so we never did an analysis of alternatives.

I rate Azure Active Directory nine out of ten. I'm sure there are some areas for improvement, but it's extremely valuable to us and the way that we operate.

Since we began to use Active Directory, I've learned a lot about industry best practices, particularly digital identity and its role in zero trust. By using a major mainstream identity provider, we're able to move toward the whole zero-trust model that's popular right now.

If you implement Azure AD, you need to consider the third-party apps you want to integrate. If they support competitors like Okta, Ping, and SailPoint, then they will almost certainly support Azure AD legacy applications. However, older software applications don't integrate well with Azure AD. 

The Authenticator app is a client application on your smartphone, usually, and you configure your profile in the cloud. I use it with my Android smartphone. 

This is a Microsoft standalone application, which the user installs usually on a mobile device, either iOS-based or in my case, Android-based. Then you add your enterprise accounts into the Microsoft Authenticator app, your work account from Microsoft 365, or your whatever on-premise account, which makes uses the Azure or whatever IDP, identity provider so that you can do single sign-on or multi-factor sign-ins.

It's an authenticator. How it's used really depends on the use case that it is configured with. If you are using your Microsoft 365 work account, if your organization requires you to do multi-factor authentication, not just with the username and password, with an additional factor like the Microsoft Authenticator app, then it simply offers that extra level of protection and security.

You can manage locally additional pathways or passwords. You can collect your credit card information or whatever secret notices in the authenticate app. This is something that got the addition the last couple of years.

You could use it for different use cases. 

The Azure AD-integrated single sign-on scenarios are the most useful due to the fact that, if you are in a cloud application that you have on your smartphone, the Authenticator just requests you to allow or deny the access as a factor. Other applications require a token where you have to enter in an additional pin. Having the single sign-on or the multi-factor way with just allowing the application with one tap to authenticate is really smart.

The solution is free to use and you can use it for every service.

They recently redid the user interface a few months ago and it looks good.

I've found the solution to be stable and scalable. 

Adding a new account can be tricky. I do it a lot and therefore am used to it, however, if you don't you tend to forget the process. If you had a bottom menu and the settings menu, for example, be added to the bottom menu instead of a different place, the top right corner, it might be more intuitive.

One area of improvement is always with global offerings from large companies where we have a lot of users that require help. Users need videos, et cetera, in their own language, and in German, there is not much from Microsoft. These are products that have a very, very fast life cycle. They upgrade the services and applications in a very high rhythm every couple of months, and even Microsoft does not have the resources to offer the learning material in all the regions, however, they offer their services.

We have then to add some additional use via manuals of how to set up, et cetera, as we have users that are not willing or cannot understand videos in English that come from Microsoft.

I've been using the solution for two to three years. It might even be longer than that.

The solution is stable. I haven't had any problems so far. 

The product scales well. 

The goal is to have everyone using it. We are in the rollout phase, and in my organization of about 1,500 users, after a couple of weeks, we have maybe a third of the population starting to use the application. 

This is like this every rollout. It takes a couple of weeks to a month. In the end, we will have around 7,500 users using Microsoft Authenticator or the Microsoft multi-factor authenticator service that allows you to choose different factors. We have a lot of things using the Authenticator app. 

We have central support organizations and I don't access Microsoft support myself. Therefore, I can't speak to their level of service.

I've used many authenticator applications. I used already Microsoft Authenticator when it came out, maybe five, six, or seven years ago. Then I used Google Authenticator and other authenticator applications. You can, however, use these all in parallel. For example, if you mix your private and your work accounts in the same applications, or if your smartphone is managed by your company and you want to separate your private accounts from any corporate policy that can delete your smartphone, you can use different authenticators for different purposes. Right now, I have the Authenticator app in front of me, and I have seven accounts configured, and this is a mix of private and corporate or work accounts.

The initial setup is easy. You just download it and start using it. 

We don't need to worry about maintenance. This is a service from Microsoft.

The solution doesn't cost anything to use.

I'm the Chief Security officer of our organization. I always have to do some research on these topics.

I'm a Microsoft customer.

I'd advise any user to use MFA these days. There's not just war in Ukraine. There's also war in this kind of space and a multi-factor authentication method is a must just to make your cyber life a little bit safer at least.

I'd rate the product eight out of ten.

We use it for all of our internal colleagues. Every single user is synced from our internal on-prem directory to Azure AD. Every single user has a presence in Azure AD and that account or identity is then used for at least 10 to 15 different applications. They directly query what groups they're a member of within Azure AD. We use Azure AD for at least 15 different applications.

It has improved our security posture. Not only with the password feature but there were also things like conditional access, applications within Azure that you can use for better access. You can put conditional access rules in front of those applications, which means that either the device that they're accessing it with has to have a certain up-to-date version of antivirus, it has to have all of its Windows updates, or they have to use multi-factor authentication. All of those nice-to-have features help our security posture a lot.

When users are in Active Directory they can use single sign-on, which means once they've signed on to their machine, they then don't have to sign on again when they access things like their email. They can just go to those URLs. Because those applications are attached to our Azure AD and to our Azure tenant, they can just go to the applications. Those applications know who they are because they have a single sign-on enabled. So that has helped them so they don't have to turn on passwords when they have to access all these different applications.

Being able to integrate with third-party solutions is the most valuable feature. These are solutions that produced software as a service and we haven't then had to bring that service to our own data or in our own directory. We can use our Azure identity to connect to their solution. Being able to connect to third-party applications in these identities is the best thing we've found.

Being able to use Azure AD means that you can use some of the Azure AD security features like Advanced Password Protection. As well as querying your normal password requirements like lengths and complexity, Azure AD has a feature in which you can put specific words. It can be words to do with your company, words to do with your company location, or words that a lot of your employees would otherwise use. You can disallow them. It's very good at making more obvious passwords, ones they're not allowed to use anymore. That's a good feature.

It has something called Dynamic Groups so that when a user joins the company and they get added to specific groups, Azure AD will add them dynamically to other groups that will give them access to some of the base applications.

We have certain sets of software that they have to be able to access. Instead of somebody who deals with new users having to add them into 20 different application groups, you need access to this, this, and this. The Dynamic Group update feature from Azure AD means that you can just put them in one group and say that they have a role, and it will automatically then add them to about six or seven other groups, giving them default access to other things as well, instead of having to do that. It means there's a lot less manual work when you get new employees.

The conditional access rules are a little limiting. There's greater scope for the variety of rules and conditions you could put in that rules around a more factual authentication for other users. If you have an Azure AD setup, you can then connect to other people's Azure AD, but you don't have a huge amount of control in terms of what you can do. Greater control over guest users and guest access would be better. It's pretty good as it is but that could be improved.

I have been using Active Directory in my current role for around six months and in a previous role for three years. I recently moved companies about three months ago. Before that, I was working for another company. I was there for about five years and for at least half that time I was using Azure AD. 

We use the latest version. Azure AD doesn't really have version numbers, it's an evolving platform. In my current role, we're on the latest version of it. 

Stability is pretty good. In the lifetime of me using it, there have been outages of certain features within Azure. We use multi-factor authentication. There have been times when that authentication feature has gone down and people couldn't access things that required that when they log on. That has happened maybe twice in the last 15 or so years. So it's pretty good. The uptime is pretty good, but it's not 100%.

The company I used to previously work for had 90,000 users that were synced. That was nothing. There was room for loads more. I think they have a limit of a million or something objects within Azure AD. That's something you can ask to have increased if that's a requirement. Scalability is pretty unlimited. There is no issue there at all.

In the company I used to work for there were 90,000 people connected to Azure AD. As soon as they logged on, they were using Azure AD. In the current company, it's nearer five or 6,000, but all of those accounts have access to Azure AD. 

There are various roles including administrators who will have the ability to change any settings like sync settings and any settings on an individual user. Then we'll have a second line, which will be able to change some of the settings within a user's group and be able to reset their password or add them to different applications. There is a first-line service desk level set of users who will only have the ability to reset passwords, but if there's anything more complicated than that they'll pass it on. There are about three different levels of access that we currently have. There is level three and two access for not too difficult issues and then level one for password resets.

In the last place I worked, there were eight of us who took care of Azure AD which was for 90,000 people in Azure. There were people actively looking at the syncing engine, which does the sync between the two domains and there were four of us who managed that. We were called identity technical experts. So of a company of 90,000, we needed four of us, but that was only so that when people went on holiday, other people could still do the work. 

It's extensively used in that everybody has an account in Azure AD. I'm guessing we don't use all the features that are available. We still have our own mailboxes on-premise rather than in Azure. I would think that would be something in the future that they would look to move some or all of our mailboxes into Azure. But we all have a presence in Azure, so we are using a lot of the features, but I believe there are still a lot more we could use. 

Their support was excellent for the deployment. They were really good. It depends a little bit on who you get at the other end and the nature of your question, but with the Azure AD stuff, we got through to experts who were able to give us the right answer straight away. They were very good at that point.

We didn't use any other cloud solution. That was the first one that we used in the cloud. There's an on-premise Active Directory which is an additional Microsoft Active Directory. And the whole point of Azure AD is that it does connect to that. We haven't used any other directory service apart from those. The on-prem version of Active Directory I've used for 20 years. I haven't used any other active directory service. I'm sure there are others, but these are the main ones.

It's a level of responsibility, which is being passed over to Microsoft, that we no longer have to deal with. Certainly, the companies I've worked with were very happy for those bits of the technology being looked after by someone else. And so we were just in charge of the data that's in there rather than all the other, not-so-interesting things like backup and such.

It's moving the responsibility of the not very exciting bits over to Microsoft and their very good SLA. You can just concentrate on the bits that you're interested in.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The only complex thing is syncing your on-premise active directory into Azure AD. It's not overly complicated and they also give you very good support. It's not very difficult to set up.

The deployment took a couple of months in the end because we just wanted to do it at a pace that we were comfortable with. We did some initial tests on users. We synced them into Azure AD, made sure they could access what we thought they could access, and make sure they could still do the same job that they could do before. Then we synced across another set of test users, then a bigger test, and then eventually synced everybody else. We did it over the course of a month. Technically you could do it in less than a week, but we just wanted to be cautious and make sure that it worked as we expected.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we have two different Azure Active Directory setups. We have one in our development area, so we did the development area one first. We sure we worked out how to do the syncing correctly, making sure we can see all the attributes that were on the on-prem AD that were then turning up in Azure AD. And then once we did a development one and that worked as we expected, we then did the production one. We did it in a step-by-step approach. We did a small set of test users, a larger set of test users, and then the entire company. It was a phased approach.

We did the deployment ourselves. We spoke directly to Microsoft when we had a couple of queries because we had an enterprise agreement with them so we can raise a number of support tickets. There were a couple of questions we had about certain features, but the actual setup and deployment of it we did ourselves.

We've certainly seen returns on investment in terms of some of the security features around Azure. We've seen threats that have been detected much earlier. Previously, threat detection and that sort of thing was more of a response rather than doing anything preemptive. Something would happen and we'd then fix it. Whereas now in Azure AD, we've seen recommendations and those sort of things coming through from Microsoft saying, "You've got these accounts, these have all got weak passwords. We recommend getting these changed for end-users before they get hacked." We saw a marked decrease in the number of attacks and breaches against our credentials when we introduced multi-factor authentication for the entire company.

Had anybody, for whatever reason, passed on or shared their username or password, those could then be used to get into our services. Now with multi-factor authentication, we've seen a marked decrease in the number of threats we've seen come through. So there are some marked benefits of the security features.

SSPR, self-service password reset has also realized ROI for us. In the past, 60 to 70% of the calls coming into our help desk guys were for password resets. A large chunk, 50 to 60% of those are gone because people can just go to the URL we've shared with them and reset their password themselves without having to phone us, which means that our service desk guys can deal with real issues rather than just somebody to put on their password. So we saw a large decrease in password resets. We're still trying to get rid of even more of those, trying to make their job even easier, but we've seen a large reduction in the number of password request changes to our service desk.

There are various levels of licenses. There are things called E3 and E5 licenses. E5 licenses come with more features but aren't required for some of the kinds of users who are just using email and Office. They only need an E3 license.

Pricing depends on the size of your organization and the deal you get with Microsoft. If you're a public sector, rather than a private sector, you get a good deal. Academic sectors get very good deals. The vast majority of our users use E5. But we're a Microsoft partner who resells their product so we get favorable rates because of that.

They have various pricing levels and the higher level you buy, the more features you get within Azure. The basic one is perfectly good for most customers. The more advanced and greater security features come with the higher pricing. And so customers who require that like military, banking, government or something are willing to pay that. The private sector generally pays more than the public sector. I know some colleagues who work in the academic sector get extremely good deals because Microsoft is very keen to have academic institutions on board. If you're working in academia or you work in the public sector, you will get a much better deal than you would in the private sector, but that's just business.

An E5 or E3 license is on a per-user basis. So the number of users you sync into Azure AD is the number of licenses you need to report that is going to be consumed by the end-users. It's a per-user per-year license.

The only other cost you get with Microsoft over and above the license cost of using Azure is the cost of using their operating system and software. So if you use Windows, then you can pay for your Windows licenses again through Azure. And if you use Office, meaning Excel, Word, and all that other stuff, you can pay an extra bit and they'll get a 365 license for the entire suite of offices.

If you're buying an E5 Office plus Windows, then you'll get a greater discount than if you were buying those separately. Microsoft will charge you for what you actually use. So if you've got a user who isn't using Office, or isn't using Windows for whatever reason, but they are consuming services within Azure, then you just give them an Azure license. Microsoft will split up and you buy a license based on what you actually use.

There are a couple of other options. There's obviously Amazon AWS and there's now Google GCP. I'm not sure either of those particular cloud providers had a particularly enterprise-level directory service. At the point when we migrated our users to Azure, I believe Azure was the only one that was an enterprise standard. Whilst the other ones have options, they weren't really suitable for the size of enterprise that we were running. 

My advice would be to talk to Microsoft or a partner of Microsoft who will deploy it for you. You can do it yourself, it is absolutely possible but seek advice. Because the more users you sync into Azure, the more you have to pay for their licenses and not everybody has to be using Azure. Sync only accounts you need to, but in all cases, I would seek advice from a Microsoft partner or Microsoft themselves. They'll be able to talk through what you actually need, what you require, and then the best way to implement that. Whether that's syncing your entire user base or whether that's syncing a small subset of them because they're the only ones that are going to consume the services required.

I have learned two main lessons from using Azure AD. First, the introduction of multi-factor authentication. It was such a marked difference in the number of security incidents we had. There was such a reduction. If you have Azure AD, switch on multi-factor authentication, not just for the admin accounts and the highly privileged accounts that can access all the bits, but switch it on for everybody. It is a pain initially, while people get themselves set up. But once it's done the number of incidents you have relating to people losing their credentials is markedly reduced. It's a massive win.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. There are some things they can improve on, but those improvements are pretty small beans compared to what they've done.

It has allowed us to use other SaaS products that will authenticate with Office 365 as well as other Microsoft products and non-Microsoft products, so we can have a single sign-on experience for our users. Rather than them needing to have multiple usernames and passwords, they just use whatever they have as their main username and password to log onto their machine.

It is SaaS based, but we sync up from our on-prem into Azure AD.

With COVID-19 at the moment, this solution is a good example of where we needed to move a lot of our traffic from our on-prem authentication into the cloud. Last year, before I joined the company, we had to setup our VPN differently. It was easy enough for us to do because our machines were already joined to Azure AD. We just split the traffic and stopped having to rely on our on-prem VPN for our Office 365 traffic. We were just good to go into the Internet because we had all the features setup, e.g., MFA and Conditional Access, which made life a lot easier.

It has made our security posture better. There are always improvements to be made, but we feel more secure because of the way that things have been setup and how everything integrates together.

• Single sign-on is the most useful at the onset. 
• The dashboards offered are very granular, in terms of usages. 
• We find the Conditional Access element and Multi-Factor Authentication side of things very useful. 

These features let us have secure, yet user-friendly interactions, rather than having to be embroiled in various types of signups for each application. These allow us to be a lot more granular as well as making sure our environment is more secure. Our accesses and users remain secure too.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and Conditional Access have helped us be more secure. There is one place where all these features are posted, making life a lot easier. If we were to try and buy these separately, then it would be a painful experience. Whereas, if it is in one product, then all these features talk to each other and it is available for us in one go. For example, when you buy a car, if you buy the steering wheel and engine separately, then you need to make it work altogether. Whereas, you just want to buy a car with everything included, making life a lot easier.

It has made the end user experience a lot better. They only have one password to get into their online applications and that makes the user experience much better.

The one area that we are working on at the moment is the business-to-consumer (B2C) element. It is not as rich as some of the other competitors out there. The B2C element of Azure AD is quite niche. Some of the features that they offer, e.g., customized emails, are not available with B2C. You are stuck with whatever email template they give you, and it is not the best user experience. For B2C, that is a bit of a negative thing.

In my previous role, there would have been a few things that I would have liked added, but they have already introduced them. Those are already in the roadmap. 

I have been using the product for many years. I have only been at Adecco for six months, but I had experience with it at my prior role as well. Overall, I have used it in excess of five years.

The stability is fantastic. It is a big step from using Active Directory on-premise to now moving to something that has been completely rethought in the cloud. It is very impressive and fits into the whole Microsoft ecosystem, making life easier.

We have had some downtime, but I think a lot of that has been unavoidable from Microsoft's side of things. Microsoft made some changes in some instances which caused certain features to be unavailable, like Azure AD became unavailable a few weeks ago. I love that they were very frank, open, and honest as to what happened. However, the bottom line is that we prefer downtime not to happen. 

We have had no problems with it. We are not exactly the biggest organization, i.e., 30,000 accounts. IT makes up probably 5,000 of those accounts, or less. If we were an organization of hundreds of thousands, then we might be questioning scalability. However, I have never known it not to be scalable. For medium- to large-organizations, it is fine. I think it is when you get into multiple companies with multiple complexities then it becomes a struggle. For us, it is more than scalable for our purposes.

We still have many applications that need to be onboarded to Azure AD. Because we are moving to the cloud, there is a lot more that we need onboarded into Azure AD, but it is working well so far.

The technical support is great. We have a dedicated resource who understands our environment. We have regular meetings with them once a week where we get to discuss the current status of various tickets as well as our questions. The support that we get is very good.

We have Premier Support. We also have Premier Mission Critical Support on Azure AD, which is where we have someone who is dedicated to our setup and knows how our environment's setup. Therefore, if we do have a major issue, then they would be brought in to help resolve those issues.

It was a given that we would use Microsoft. To use Microsoft 365, you need to use Azure AD, so that is what we did.

I have always used AD and Azure AD.

In my previous role, the initial setup was quite simple. It was a simple case of install and follow some wizards, then you pretty much had it setup and synced to your Azure AD from the on-prem. Minimum effort was required.

The deployment was about three weeks, which was mainly the change process and getting it through our internal changes. It was quite quick. 

We did it ourselves internally with some help from Microsoft. There were four people involved in the deployment: the service owner, a Microsoft product engineer, and two internal engineers.

We have the maintenance outsourced to a partner. However, we have had trouble with this partner because of their lack of delivery.

Ideally, I would like around five people to work with the partner and maintain the environment. At the moment, we have one person and are recruiting two others. For our scale, three to five people would be great as well as working with a partner to do the operations. That is the model that I am using.

It is one of those costs where you can't really quantify a return on investment. In the grand scheme of things, if we didn't have it, we would probably have a lot more breaches. It would be a lot harder to detect issues because we would have people using static usernames and passwords for various sites, making us open to a lot more attacks. The amount of security and benefit that we get out of it is not quantifiable but the return of investment from a qualitative point of view is much higher than not having it. 

It is the one platform that should be used for all authentication. Azure AD allows you to have one username and password to access all of your sites, which makes life a lot easier. Therefore, the return on investment is good because people have to use the one ID and password.

Be sure:

1. You know your userbase, e.g., how many users you have. 
2. You choose the right license and model that suit your business requirements.

In the future, I would maybe like better integration with competitive products. Obviously, Microsoft would be selective on that anyway. For example, working alongside Okta as a competitor, their product seems to be a bit richer in its offerings. From what I have seen, Okta has a bit more of an edge, which is something that might benefit Azure AD.

Be prepared to learn. It is a massive area. There are a lot of features offered by Azure AD. It works well within the Microsoft realm but also it can work very well with non-Microsoft realms, integrating with other parties. The fact it is Microsoft makes life so much easier, because everyone integrates with Microsoft. Just be prepared to absorb because it is a big beast. It is also a necessary evil that you need to have it. The advantages outweigh the disadvantages of having it.

The learning curve is both steep and wide. You can only focus on what you can focus on with the resources you have in your organization. It is such a big product and changing all the time. This means that you need dedicated people to be on it. There is a lot of keeping up with what Microsoft puts out there with Azure AD, which is great. This makes its feature-rich, but you need to be able to learn how it integrates into your business as well.

What Azure AD does for my current organization is sufficient, but we are probably not adopting most of what Azure AD has. We do not have it at a mature place at the moment, but we hope (over the next couple of years) to get it up to the latest and greatest.

It is an integral part of using Microsoft stuff, so we are not going to move away from it any time soon. If anything, we will ensure that everything is on Azure AD and authenticating users use Azure AD. That part will still take some time to do. Like most large organizations who have been around for a long time, we have legacy to deal with and some of that legacy does not support Azure AD. So, we are working towards that.

If you come from a company with legacy technology, then there will be a lot of business and technological changes for you to make.

The adoption of Azure AD B2C is progressing somewhat well. That is something that we just started in the last couple of months. We are having more of our products being onboarded into it. We will be moving other implementations of Azure AD into the one Azure AD implementation, and it has been great so far.

I would rate it as a nine out of 10. I would have given it a 10, but it is impossible for something to be perfect. The product does itself a disservice when there is an impact due to downtime, which we have had over the years. Because you rely on it so heavily, you can't afford for it to go down for a few minutes because then there will be user impact. 

We are using Azure Active Directory (AD) for:

• Application authentication, which is single sign-on. 
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA). 
• Conditional access for people coming in from non-trusted networks, which are interlinked. 
• Azure AD B2B. 

These are the four big items that we are using.

The flexibility around accessing company systems from anywhere at any time has proven to be very helpful. Organizations decided during the COVID-19 pandemic, on a very short notice, to announce that everyone should be working from home. The good part was that our company was already working under Azure Active Directory, and most of our applications were under Azure at that time. For us, it was a very seamless transition. There were no major impacts on the migration nor did we have to do any special setups or need to configure networks. So, it was a very seamless experience for our users, who used to come into our office, to access systems. They started working from home and there was no difference for them. We did not have to do anything special to support that transition from working from the office to working from home. It was seamless. There was no impact to the end users.

Bringing our many hundreds of applications onto Azure Active Directory single sign-on authentication has had a big impact on users' productivity, usage, and adoption of enterprise applications because they don't need to log in. It is the same credentials and token being used for days and months when people use our systems with hundreds of applications being integrated. From a user perspective, it is quite a seamless experience. They don't need to remember their username, passwords, and other credential information because you are maintaining a single sign-on token. So, it is a big productivity enhancement. Before, we were not using a single sign-on for anything. Now, almost 90 to 95 percent of applications are on Azure Active Directory single sign-on.

The single sign-on is an amazing product. Its integration with the back-end, like MFA and conditional access, is very helpful for enterprise class companies because of changing dynamics as well as how companies and workers interact. Traditionally, companies used to have their own premises, networks, network-level VPN and proxy settings, and networks to access company systems. Now, anyone can work from anywhere within our company. We are a global company who works across more than 60 countries, so it is not always possible to have secure networks. So, we need to secure our applications and data without having a network parameter-level security. 

Azure Active Directory provides us with identity-based authentication, which secures access at the user level and also integrates with conditional access policies and multi-factor authentication helping to increase the identity security for that person. So, the hacking and leaking of passwords is a secondary problem because you will not authenticate a person with one factor. There is a second factor of authentication available to increase the security premise for your company.

The analytics are very helpful. They give you very fine grain data around patterns of usage, such as, who is using it, sign-in attempts, or any failed logins. It also provides detailed analytics, like the amount of users who are using which applications. The application security features let you drill-down reports and generate reports based on the analytics produced via your Active Directory, which is very helpful. This can feed into security operation centers and other things.

One of the areas where Microsoft is very actively working on enhancing is the capabilities around the B2B and B2C areas.

Microsoft is actively pursuing and building new capabilities around identity governance.

There is a concept of cross-tenant trust relationships, which I believe Microsoft is actively pursuing. That is something which in the coming days and years to come by will be very key to the success of Azure Active Directory, because many organizations are going into mergers and acquisitions or spinning off new companies. They will still have to access the old tenant information because of multiple legal reasons, compliance reasons, and all those things. So, there should be some level of tenant-level trust functionality, where you can bring people from other tenants to access some part of your tenant application. So, that is an area which is growing. I believe Microsoft is actively pursuing this, and it will be an interesting piece.

I have been using it for three and a half years.

We have worked very closely with Microsoft over the past few years. We were one of the early adopters as an enterprise. We worked very closely with Microsoft to develop many products and features.

Looking at our journey over the last three and a half years, there were a few stability incidents, which is understandable from any technology platform provider perspective. However, it was overall a very good experience with a stable platform. There were two or three major incidents in the last three years.

There are about eight people who handle the day-to-day maintenance. These people focus on single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and Azure B2B.

The scalability is amazing. Microsoft gets billions of logins every day. They are scaling it every day. They announced an increase in the availability that the SLA guarantees from 99.9 to 99.99 percent from April of this year. Overall, it is very stable and scalable. These are things that we don't need to worry about.

It is fully rolled out to everyone in our organization.

Overall, the technical support is very good. Overall, if you follow the customer support route and raise an incident ticket, then they are very prompt. They work very closely and collaboratively with us. We have a dedicated technical account manager (TAM). We have governance in place. We engage with them bi-weekly. So, we have a pretty good working structure with them.

Identity within Microsoft is a separate division, and we work very closely with them.

We didn't use another solution before Azure AD.

The initial setup was straightforward.

How you plan the tenant and set it up is quite key. There are major components that you need to be aware of: 

• Are you planning to implement multi-factor authentication at the tenant level? 
• What type of conditional access policies do you want to implement? 
• What type of access governance do you want to put in? 
• What type of role catalogue do you want to maintain? 
• What type of structure of the AD organization you want to maintain? 
• What type of device registrations do you want? 

There are some prerequisite checklists available from Microsoft. However, these are quite fundamental decisions. If you don't take the lead on them, these decisions will impact you, then you have to go back and fix them later on. So, plan ahead. 

Initial deployment took us a few months across our organization, but we decided to use most of the elements at a very early stage. So, our use case could be different than other companies. Some organizations that I know have chosen not to deploy multi-factor authentication nor do self-service password reset to deployment, then the user community is impacted with that. It can differ organization to organization based on the scale, number of users, locations, etc. So, there are many factors involved. 

We phased out our deployment over a couple of years, focusing on single sign-on and multi-factor authentication, then self-service password reset and other components. So, we did it as a phased deployment with a small team of four or five people.

I strongly recommend the Microsoft GTP Teams, which are with their R&D division. They have a go into production, dedicated team who work with customers from an end-to-end lifecycle perspective. So, they will help you to build the tenant from scratch, following the right standards and guidelines. For us, it was straightforward, but we started this journey in 2017/2018. It is quite a mature product now.

We work with most managed service providers, like Infosys, TCS, Wipro, etc. We have had good experiences with them. Initially, we worked with Infosys.

We are closing all data centers. Therefore, to build or enhance any existing capability in applications, it could have been very a costly effort for us. Rather than building an authentication platform, we are using a standard-based approach where we just need to plug and play. Instead of going in and reinventing the wheel for every application, we are using a standard out-of-the-box service offering from Azure Active Directory, where we just consume that service, then users have a seamless experience.

Having a single supplier saves you loads of headaches from:

• Multiple suppliers and multiple technologies
• Integrating everything.
• Doing upgrades.
• Maintenance.
• In-house deployment
• Having multiple components of those solutions to work together.
• Managing multiple vendors, supplier support teams, contracts, renewals, and licenses. 

If you are dealing with one supplier with an out-of-the-box solution, which provides you end-to-end capabilities, then it is naturally cheaper and less of a headache to manage and operate.

This solution was the natural choice. There is no vendor nor supplier providing this type of capability right now in the market, especially considering people in organizations are using Office 365. So, it is the natural choice to not to go with a third-party supplier, then try to integrate those third-party solutions and technologies into Microsoft. It is one box and the same Office 365 tenant in the same environment where you operate all your settings. Therefore, it is a very natural, out-of-the-box solution.

Look at the market. However, look at it from an end-to-end perspective, especially focused on your applications and how a solution will integrate with your overall security landscape. This is key. Azure Active Directory provides this capability, integrating with your Office 365 tenant, data security elements, classifications, identity protection, device registrations, and Windows operating system. Everything comes end-to-end integrated. While there is no harm evaluating different tools, Azure AD is an out-of-the-box solution from Microsoft, which is very helpful.

Every day we are increasing the number of users and onboarding new applications. Also, we are growing the B2B feature. We try to use any new feature or enhancement coming in from Microsoft, working very closely with them. It is an ongoing journey.

Dealing with a single supplier is easier rather than dealing with five suppliers. Historically, if you have to do anything like that, then you will end up dealing with at least 10 different vendors and 10 different technologies. It is always interesting and challenging to manage different roadmaps, strategies, upgrade parts, licensing, and contracts. The biggest lesson learnt is wherever you can go with native-cloud tools and technologies, then go for it.

I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10.