Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

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. 

We use this solution to authenticate to the portal. There are also some VMs that are not domain-joined, so we use Azure users that we create natively in the portal.

We also use it for our applications. The accounts that we create natively in Azure are used for application authentication.

We have a hybrid deployment model where some accounts are primarily native in Azure, whereas others are on-premises. We also have accounts that are synchronized between our on-premises servers and Azure.

Azure AD has features that have helped to improve our security posture. We have a service called Azure AD Privileged Identity Management, where instead of our administrators having permanent access or permanent admin assignment, they can now activate admin roles only when they need to perform administrative-level tasks.

This means that instead of using permanent assignments, our administrators activate the specific roles that they need at the moment that they need them. After the task is complete, the administrative access expires. This has definitely improved our security posture.

Using this product has also had a positive effect on our end-user experience. The self-service password reset is something that has definitely improved our end-user experience. Instead of having to call our service desk, users can now reset their own passwords.

This is important because due to our multi-factor authentication, we no longer have policies where we have to have periodic password changes. We have three and four-factor stages of authentication, which makes our logins more secure. This is why users don't have to change or reset their passwords on a regular basis.

One of the ways that Azure AD has improved the way our organization functions is to help cut down on service desk requests. If I have an issue with my password, in the past, I would have had to log a ticket with the service desk. With most of us working remotely, this would've posed a challenge. It would have required the service desk to verify that I am who I say I am, for example. Now, because users set up their own profiles and are able to change passwords for themselves, at any moment that their account is compromised, they're able to change their own password.

Overall, this solution has definitely improved our organization's security posture. We no longer have permanent administrative permission assignments, and we are also able to restrict who is able to log in to certain applications. Finally, we are able to see and review any risky or suspicious sign-ins.

Specifically, in the infrastructure team, we now have managed identities. Instead of having to create service accounts, we have managed identities that are directly linked to our resources that support them. All of that is managed by Azure Active Directory.

Another way that this solution has improved how we do our work is that we no longer have to keep a record of all service accounts or use one service account for multiple services. Now, each service that supports managed identities can have its own service account, and that is managed by Azure AD.

The most valuable feature is the conditional access policies. This gives us the ability to restrict who can access which applications or the portal in specific ways. We are able to define access based on job roles. For example, I'm primarily in the infrastructure team and only certain people should be able to connect to the Resource Manager. We can also define which IP addresses or locations those people can connect from before they can access the portal.

If your organization requires additional security then the subscription will be more expensive.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for approximately five years, since 2016.

In terms of stability, Azure Active Directory is definitely an improvement from what we used in the past. I'm happy so far with the offerings and we hardly ever have any service disruptions.

We have a lot of different people using this solution. We have normal users and we have administrators. It's a large organization.

So far, I've been happy with the technical support.

There are very few service disruptions and also, because of our agreement with Microsoft, we are able to get escalated support.

We hardly ever have any downtime. When we do need support, it's normally escalated and our service is restored in a reasonable timeframe.

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

Prior to this solution, we used the on-premises version of Active Directory.

The switch was part of our cloud migration strategy. For us to be able to use our apps and workloads in the cloud, we had to have Identity Management as part of our migration scope. It's linked to our cloud migration strategy.

I was not involved with the initial setup but I assume that it was not complex because we have Microsoft consultants assisting us.

We specifically work with Microsoft directly. We don't use a reseller or service provider. All of the assistance that we get is directly from the vendor.

Our technical team is responsible for deployment and maintenance. I'm not sure how many people are in that team. Somebody from security is involved, but I'm not sure what other roles are required for maintenance tasks.

We have definitenly seen a return on investment from using this product. We have seamless authentication, quicker response times, more robust security, access from anywhere without having to set up VPN links, and federated models.

If we had similar services on-premises, I assume that it would be expensive, especially given that we used to have a perpetual licensing model. Now that we are able to have a subscription-based service, it has not only improved our security posture but also cut down on costs.

My advice concerning the pricing and licensing would vary depending upon the stage of maturity of the organization. I've been with companies that are using the Office 365 license for Active Directory, whereas others are able to use the free version of it.

For organizations such as the one that I'm at now, where we require more security and have services like the Conditional Access Policies or Privileged Identity management, you have to upgrade to a higher level of the solution.

I'm not sure about the specific costs or how they're calculated, but essentially, the costs go up based on the level of security that is required by the organization.

I can't say for certain what our future plans are for Azure AD but I see it being used long-term. It has helped our organization to grow because of what we are able to do. Also, it has greatly improved our security posture because of the services that are available.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

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.

Microsoft Authenticator is a third-party application used to authenticate users in our Microsoft environment, such as accessing emails or applications like Excel, Word, or any other application. It is also used for online login purposes. The configuration process is simple from the admin side; we just need to enable it for the user. The user will receive a notification on their mobile device and then needs to download the Microsoft Authenticator app. They can add their account by entering their username and password. Once this is done, the configuration is complete.

While using any applications in the environment, users need to authenticate using Microsoft Authenticator. They will receive a one-time password that expires in thirty seconds, which they must use for authentication. One advantage of using Microsoft Authenticator is that it ensures the security of user accounts. Even if someone tries to hack or authenticate into another person's Microsoft account, they will be unable to do so without the password. The user will receive a notification if someone attempts to access their account and can choose whether to grant them access or not. If any unauthorized access is detected, we will investigate to identify the person behind the authentication attempt.

Microsoft Authenticator is highly secure. It is connected to its own servers. Using this application employs encryption methods, and the user has the right to access it. Additionally, we can utilize the biometric fingerprint tool for authentication, ensuring that only one person has access to it. This feature is extremely beneficial.

The cost of licensing always has room for improvement.

I have been using Microsoft Authenticator for three years.

Microsoft Authenticator is scalable.

The initial setup is straightforward. We downloaded it from the Google Play store and used a name and password. That's all it takes, and we're ready to go. The configuration duration is set on an admin site, but the actual configuration must be done on the end devices themselves. This can include mobile devices, tablets, or any other device that we can use, and takes about ten minutes to complete.

We have observed a 60 percent return on investment with Microsoft Authenticator, which provides us with peace of mind, knowing that there is no unauthorized access occurring.

Microsoft Authenticator is included in the package when we purchase a license from Microsoft.

I rate Microsoft Authenticator ten out of ten.

We have 120 users. The solution is used daily and is required whenever a Microsoft account needs authentication to ensure that only the data owner or email owner has the proper authentication to access the mailbox or application.

I will advise people to continue using the Microsoft Authenticator because it provides security and data protection. From a cybersecurity perspective, it is beneficial to use the Microsoft Authenticator for the authentication of Microsoft products.