Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

Microsoft Authenticator is the tool provided to assure that we are using the Microsoft product in the correct way, from the Microsoft point of view.

It's two-factor authentication. I personally use several of them, from Google to Microsoft Authenticator to others. It's a solution that works.

The solution is stable. 

The product is easy to install and quick to deploy.

The solution is secure.

It offers good Microsoft integration capabilities. 

For the moment, I don't have any complaints. 

The pricing is okay, however, it could always be better in the future.

It is a stable, reliable product. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

In terms of scalability, we don't have complaints about this from the users of this kind of solution.

Several people in our company use the product. I am unsure of the exact number. 

When we have problems, we don't go to Microsoft; we complain internally to a group that is responsible for keeping this working. I can't speak to how Microsoft's support is. I've never directly interacted with them.

I also use Google Authenticator.

I need to use different services to log on. Microsoft promotes its own solutions. For my bank, for instance, I have a solution imposed by my bank. For Google, I have Google Authenticator. For Microsoft Plus. I have Microsoft Authenticator. For our VPN, we use FortiGate, the authenticator.

The installation is easy. You can do the installation on mobile phones and it can be installed on the web. It's not a problem.

The deployment is fast and only takes about two minutes. It's supposed to be done by the end-user.

I have done the implementation myself. I did not need the assistance of any integrators or consultants.

I don't pay a separate licensing fee. It's already included in the service we buy from Microsoft.

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use Azure Active Directory for the user rules, identity management, user rule validation, authorization, and authentication.

The most valuable features of this solution are definitely the authorization and authentication, and the rule-based user validation.

Azure Active Directory is quite easy to use.

We are quite happy with the Azure Active Directory services we are utilizing.

Definitely, the price could be lower. When we moved from AWS to Azure, we started paying more. The licensing fees were more expensive.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for the last 10 to 15 years.

Azure Active Directory is quite stable.

Azure Active Directory is a scalable solution.

We have approximately 100 users in our company.

We have plans to increase our usage.

Technical support is quite good, they are awesome.

Previously, we were using an open-source solution, but we are happy with the Azure Active Directory solution.

We received the migrations as a direct value add because we are a part of Microsoft MSP.

The Azure Active Directory migration took ten days to complete.

This solution is maintained by a team of three to four people.

We had assistance from a consultant.

We pay an annual subscription fee.

I would recommend this solution to others who are considering using it.

I would rate Azure Active Directory a ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution with our customers that use it.

We're using the solution for a lot of all different things. We have used it to support. We have something called BankID here in Sweden, where you identify yourself to your internet bank and lots of other areas and we have based our connection to BankID using Active Directory. 

It's user-friendly and easy to understand. It's doing work great so far.

We're mainly using templates and using the APIs rather than using the GUI. That's the easiest way to do things.

The initial setup is pretty easy.

The solution scales well.

It's a stable product for the most part.

Something that can be improved is their user interface. It needs to be better.

It's always a good idea to have some kind of expert GUI that you can turn on/off. There are a lot of settings to work through. If you are not that experienced, then maybe you might not want to use them. 

There should be an easier way to set up the regular things and then switch to a more expert kind of wizard to set things up.

We've used the product for many, many years at this point. 

The solution is stable. There aren't issues with bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze. Its performance is good.

We can scale the solution if we need to.

It is my understanding that support is not as good as Cloudflare, however, I haven't been using the support that much for Azure. There is lots of information out there on the internet. If you search, you don't need to contact support often.

The solution has been straightforward to set up. It's simple. It's not overly complex. 

We have a handful of people involved in the initial setup. You don't need very many. They are mostly specialists and technicians. 

While I don't directly deal with tracking ROI, our customers are satisfied with the way we are billing them when we're setting things up. 

The pricing seems to be fine for our clients.

We are an integrator. We are using the latest versions of the product.

New users should know that it's quite easy to set up a sandbox environment and a free account in order to play with it. It's fairly easy to kind of set up the proof of concept.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use Azure Active Directory to add authentication for users when they sign into the applications. We also use it to provide single sign-on (SSO) to applications.

What I like most about Azure Active Directory is its SSO (single sign-on) feature, as we have a community of users with different IDs and passwords, and this feature helps integrate all these. 

I've been using Azure Active Directory since 2016.

Azure Active Directory is a very stable solution.

Azure Active Directory is scalable.

The technical support for this solution is fine.

Installing this solution was seamless, but it took time for it to complete. It took one month.

We used an integrator to deploy Azure Active Directory.

Azure Active Directory has different licensing plans. We're on a yearly subscription. It is expensive, but if you look at the technical benefits it provides, the price for it is decent. If the cost of the license could be lowered, then it would be better.

Azure Active Directory is a cloud-based solution in which we have done our integration with our applications.

We currently have five or six different teams using this solution. We have three people with admin rights, 3 technicians, and a technical team. Some users have admin rights, e.g. general admin rights, while some have basic rights.

Our plan to increase the usage of Azure Active Directory depends on how many new employees will join the company. It could happen.

I'm recommending Azure Active Directory to other people who want to start using it because it meets requirements.

I'm giving Azure Active Directory a score of 10 out of 10.

We use Azure Active Directory for quite a few things. We use it for security group management of authorized principals who need access to get SSH-signed certificates for user logins. We use it for automated jot-based (JSON Web Token) self sign-on for our lowest, least privileged credentials on certain products. We also use AAD for B2B coordination of SSO when we're bringing users onto our platform, where they have Active Directory on their side. We use the OIDC-based SSO flows through AAD to merge project-level AADs back to our corporate AAD for internal single sign-on flows.

• There is tech support to help with any OIDC-based setups between organizations.
• It has good support for SAML 2.0 and OIDC-based setups for our remote identity providers.

The solution has come a long way. Now, with the Azure AD B2C offering integrated as well, we've got a full IAM-type solution for our customer-facing identity management. In addition, when it comes to user journeys we now can hook in custom flows for different credential checking and authorizations for specific conditional access. 

I don't think the documentation is where it needs to be yet, for user journeys and that type of flow. There is still trial and error that I would like to see cleaned up.

Also, they do have support for SAML 2.0 and it's very easy to set up linkages to other Active Directory customers. But if somebody is using an IdP or an identity solution other than Active Directory, that's where you have to start jumping through some hoops. So far, our largest customers are all using Active Directory, but I don't think the solution is quite as third-party-centric as Okta or Auth0. Those solutions have a lot of support for all kinds of IdPs you want to link up to.

Finally, a couple of months ago I was on a team that was looking at low-cost MFA for SSO, where we would control the MFA on our side, instead of having the remote database handle it. In those kinds of flows, there aren't as many off-the-shelf options as I would like. There were cost implications, if I recall, to turn on 2FA. Also, the linkages that they had set up off-the-shelf—obviously they had the Authenticator app—meant that if you wanted to do something with Duo Mobile or any of the other popular 2FA providers, it seems it might have taken us more time than we wanted to put into it.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for a couple of years now.

The stability is great.

The scalability is also great.

We have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft, so we aren't typical folks. Through that agreement, we get a dedicated technical account manager and that person is able to escalate tickets when necessary. I have found Microsoft to be very responsive when needed, although we haven't really needed them that often.

We use Azure a lot, and therefore, AAD was an obvious choice and we thought, "Why not use it?"

They've done a good job on OIDC. That was a pretty simple, seamless setup. We've done that with multiple remote IdPs now, and I don't recall too many issues there.

There is much less cost investment going into it now. We didn't have to do a volume buy to get onto the platform. When it comes to ROI, there is low friction and a high, immediate return on investment.

It's relatively inexpensive in comparison with third-party solutions. It's highly available and supported by Microsoft Azure in our enterprise agreements. With the addition of their B2C tenants, it's hard to beat from a cost perspective now.

They changed their pricing for B2B access. You used to need shared licenses so that, if you were paying for a Premium AAD on your side, that would allow you to have five shared external mapped users. They've blown that all up and it's now dirt cheap. It works out to pennies per user per month, instead of dollars. A P1 user license in their system was $6 per user per month, which is cost-prohibitive for a lot of B2B SSO flows, but now it's down in the pennies range.

I am a systems manager. I use Azure Active Directory every day for my support job.

Our authentication tools to single sign-on portals are hosted in different cloud products, like Amazon or GCP. So, we create an enterprise application and Azure Active Directory to give our users for authentication access to various public URLs.

Before Azure Active Directory, it took effort to provide cloud access to on-premises users. With Azure Active Directory and AD Connect, we are able to sync on-prem users to the cloud with minimal effort. We don't have to manage keeping multiple entities for the same user.

The multi-factor authentication (MFA) is one of the best aspects of the product. 

The security features are great. They will report in advance to you in the case of suspicious activity. 

The GUI is pretty enhanced. You can configure applications or do whatever they need to do. 

Azure Active Directory currently supports Linux machines. However, the problem is that you get either full or minimal access. It would be very nice if we could have some granular authorization modules in Azure Active Directory, then we could join it to the Linux machine and get elevated access as required. Right now, it is either full or nothing. I would like that to be improved. 

We have the ability to join Windows VMs to Azure. It would be nice if we could have some user logs, statistics, and monitoring with Azure Active Directory.

When we subscribe to MFA, the users get MFA tokens. However, it is not a straightforward process to embed any of the OTP providers. It would be good if Microsoft started embedding other third-party OTP solutions. That would be a huge enhancement.

I have been using Active Directory for two years.

This product is used every second of every day.

The solution offers nice stability and performance. 

In my organization, there might be as many as 60,000 people who utilize the solution. 

The scalability is awesome. You don't even need to think about scalability because Microsoft manages it.

We use it on a daily basis.

The support could be better. Lately, they sort of dropped off a bit in terms of quality. Recently, Microsoft support has not been doing such a good job. Previously, they used to do a good job.

In the past, AD Connect was not syncing. It threw errors in the beginning. So, I had to call up technical support to solve the problem. At the time, we were satisfied with their assistance.

I am also using AWS.

Azure Active Directory is not an Active Directory product. It is just the application proxy. You need to have an on-prem solution. Azure Active Directory would just be a proxy that uses the on-prem data and hosts the application. It is not a full-scale Active Directory solution. However, it has a lot of enhancements. The traditional on-prem Active Directory hosts the users and computers as well as some additional group objects. 

On the other hand, AWS Active Directory has all the capabilities of the traditional Active Directory with limited access for the administrator. All domain administration and sensitive credentials will be managed by AWS. So, you don't need to worry about application delays or syncing issues.  

The initial setup is simple.

It is pretty easy to set up the product. You subscribe in Azure Active Directory. By default, it will have an extension where you need to register. If you need a custom domain name, then you need to register with your public DNS providers to create the DNS public entry. You will then have to prove that you own the domain name. Once it has been proven, then your Active Directory pretty much works. 

If you need to sync up your on-prem users with the Azure Active Directory, then you need to have an AD Connect server installed at the VM-level domain. It should be credentialed so AD Connect can use credentials to read your on-premises and sync it to the cloud. Once this has been done, you are good to go. As an enhancement, for whatever user you are syncing, you can mandate them by adding them to a group or rolling out an MFA policy.

Since it is pretty straightforward, you just need one person to deploy it.

I implemented it in an hour.

Some maintenance is required. However, it is not on Azure Active Directory's part. Rather, it is for AD Connect. Often, we see that the connection is getting lost or something is not happening. Sometimes, port 443 might not be open from your on-prem Azure Active Directory. In that case, if you haven't implemented it in the beginning, then you need to do this. For a high availability solution, if you find that the machine is having additional issues, then you might need a higher AD Connect device. I would probably also deploy it with a different availability.

The solution has three types of tiers:

1. E1 has very basic features. 
2. You get limited stuff in E2 and cannot have Office 360 associated with it. 
3. E3 is on the costly side and has all the features.
   

If you need to have an Exchange subscription or email functionality, then you need to pay more for that.

We are using both the on-premises version and the SaaS version.

I would advise potential new users to learn a bit about the product before jumping in. If you are new, you need to do background research about Azure Active Directory. You also need to understand its purpose and how you want to leverage it. When you have a draft architecture in place, then you can go ahead and implement this solution. If it needs to be reimplemented, it is just a matter of five minutes.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10.

We have integrated our internal applications and cloud applications with Azure AD. We also have a few external applications for which we need to implement a self-service portal and handle requests such as password reset.

We have external applications such as Cloudspace, and we have integrated Azure AD with Cloudspace. We mainly use a single sign-on. Our main target is to go through all single sign-on applications and integrate them with Azure AD. We also need to audit everything in Office 365. Our mail system is Office 365, and we also do some auditing.

We are also implementing Intune. We have deployed some basic policies for mobile devices, and we are working on improving those policies. We need to configure conditional access and improve policies for the applications and devices. We are doing some testing, and it is in progress.

In terms of deployment, we have a hybrid deployment of Azure AD. We have the 2019 version of AD on-prem.

We are able to do complete onboarding through AD. The users have access through the AD login, which is synced with Azure AD. We have a hybrid environment, and every cloud application is accessed through AD. We have defined AD policies related to password expiration, limitations, etc. It has provided smoother accessibility.

Previously, when we had on-premise AD, to reset their own passwords, users had to use a VPN or bring their laptop to the office. With self-service, users can easily change their passwords. This reduces the workload for IT support. If their password gets locked, they can unlock it themself by using Azure AD. Previously, it was also difficult to integrate with external applications, but with Azure AD, integration with external applications is easier. 

Azure AD makes it easier to see and monitor everything in terms of access. We can see sign-in logs or audit logs, and we can also integrate devices by using Intune. So, we can manage BYOD devices inside the organization.

We are using Conditional Access, MFA, and AIP. We have integrated it with Intune, and we already have DLPs.

Application integration is easy. MFA and password self-service have reduced most of the supportive work of IT. We use multi-factor authentication. Every access from a user is through multi-factor authentication. There is no legacy authentication. We have blocked legacy authentication methods. For people who use the MDM on mobile, we push our application through Intune. In a hybrid environment, users can work from anywhere. With Intune, we can push policies and secure the data. 

The audit logs are very good for seeing everything.

We started using it at the end of last year.

It is stable. I haven't faced any issues. There could be some issues related to syncing because of on-prem, but overall, it is quite stable.

I don't have much experience with scalability. I only use tier one or Premium P1, and I want to move to Premium P2 that has more security levels and more advantages.

In my previous companies, there were a thousand users. In my current company, we have less than 500 users. It is working fine, and there are no issues.

We plan to expand our usage. If it is possible, we plan to upgrade our subscription to Premium P2. We have introduced it to one or two companies who were looking for such a solution. We have already introduced the Azure AD hybrid platform for companies that had only an on-prem setup.

Sometimes, there are issues, but they are usually because of user mistakes. We are able to fix such issues. We are able to find the issue and do troubleshooting. We are able to find information about what is wrong and how to fix it. 

Their support is okay. They are able to resolve the issue, but sometimes, there is a delay because the ticket goes to the wrong person or the wrong time zone. I would rate them an eight or a nine out of 10.

We have only been using Microsoft solutions.

It is easy to deploy and not complex, but it also depends on your requirements. We have tenants and subscriptions, and we connect AD to Azure AD through Azure AD Connect, and they are periodically synced.

The connectivity took a day or two. It doesn't take long. Sometimes, there could be issues with on-prem because of not having a standardized setup or because of parameter duplication, but after we resolve the issues, it doesn't take long. For its setup, only one person is generally required.

It was implemented by me, and I also had one guy's support. 

Our infrastructure team takes care of the maintenance part. They are taking care of monitoring. If there is an alert or something happens, they take care of it. It doesn't require much maintenance. One person can manage it.

We have been able to achieve our target and requirements for security. After the move to Azure AD, the security level is high. The users have to change passwords and do MFA a few times if something goes wrong, and if they can't, the device is going to block them. Sometimes, users are not happy, but at the organizational level, it is good. It is costly, but the improvement is good in terms of performance and security.

It is a packaged license. We have a Premium P1 subscription of Office 365, and it came with that.

Two or three years ago, we were looking at some open-source solutions.

I would rate Azure Active Directory a nine out of 10.

We are using it for all non-structured data and as an identity manager for all of our accounts. In addition, we use it also to authenticate Google services, because we have Google Workspace for email, and to integrate other tools with our services. We are able to keep it all going, balanced, and synchronized. It's very good. We use it for just about everything that we need to do an identity check on.

We couldn't live without the Active Directory services. It has helped to improve our security posture. We have a lot of users and hardware to manage and we can do that with Active Directory.

The most valuable feature is the ability to deploy and make changes to every workstation that I need to. We use it to control policy and I can apply the right policies to all our 1,500 workstations, notebooks, et cetera.

I have been using the Active Directory solution for three years. I'm responsible for almost all infrastructure services in our organization.

It's pretty stable. In the three years, the service has never been down.

As far as I know, it works for 10,000 and 100,000. It's just difficult to find current information, such as how much hardware and how many licenses we would need to keep it going. But it's scalable and works really well. We can keep adding servers and scale up or out.

We don't have another company that provides support for Active Directory. On my team, there are three people who work with it, and we have about 2,000 users in our company.

To be honest, I can barely navigate Microsoft's support. Microsoft is so well-known and there is so much information to look up on the internet, that we have never come to the point where we have actually had to open an issue with Microsoft's team. We can almost always find out the information that we need by looking it up with Google or in Microsoft's Knowledge Base.

We used to use LDAP, a free tool, but since almost all of our hardware needed integration, we had to move to Active Directory. We couldn't apply the policies that we needed, using open source, and we couldn't keep the integration going the way we needed to.

We are really happy with how the functionality Azure Active Directory gives us. I have a security policy applied to all workstations. Before, all of our users could configure their machines the way they wanted to. As a result, we often had to reconfigure and do other things to them as well because the computers were crashing. We almost don't have to do that anymore.

The trick was to immigrate from LDAP. We had to get all the properties from the files into Active Directory, so it took some time. When we did that, there were some issues with the system and we had to do it manually. It would be nice if they had a service that would make it easier to migrate from LDAP to Active Directory, keeping all of the properties from files and non-structured data as well.

It gives a good return on investment. The amount of first-level support we have had to give internally has dropped a lot since we applied the policies and restricted our users. But our users are now more satisfied because their computers don't have the issues that they had before. Before Active Directory, there were many issues that our users complained about, like worms and malware. We don't have those issues anymore. Even with endpoint protection we had some cases of viruses in our company, but now we don't have them either.

Directly, I couldn't calculate the return on investment, but indirectly we saved by reducing work for our team, and we are keeping our users satisfied.

The process for buying licenses from Microsoft is somewhat messy and really hard to do. We have to talk to someone because it's hard to find out how many licenses we need. If I'm applying for 2,000 users, how many Windows licenses do we need?

They could also charge less for support. You buy the license, but if you want to keep it in good standing, you have to pay for the support, and it is expensive. It's okay to pay for the license itself, but to pay so much for support...

We were thinking about buying another tool, to be capable of managing and keeping all the identities within our organization current. But we had to go straight to Microsoft because there are no other solutions that I know of. By now, almost all organizations are using Windows 10 or 11, and it would be hard to achieve the possibilities that we have with Active Directory if we used another service.

We are integrated with NetApp because we use NetApp storage. It's pretty awesome. We are also integrated with many others, such as our data center hardware with storage from IBM. We're using it for logging switches, as well. It works really well.

My advice to others would be to look at the options and focus on how you can pay less. Do the research so that you buy just the essential licenses to keep it going. If you don't do the sizing well, you can buy more, but it's expensive to keep it going and pay for support.