Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

The use cases typically include external customer authentication, which we do, and by customers, I mean our hotel partners. There is basic user authentication and the ability to isolate those users based on a particular security environment, whether they are coming from a PCI environment, lab environment, corp environment, etcetera. Each of those has to pass through specific security, so everything that your Active Directory or Windows AD is solving on-premise is essentially the use case, except for the external customer situation which was the one thing that made me look at Entra ID. Unfortunately, the way Entra ID works created a major security issue that I cannot go into regarding guest users for our tenant. We are now trying to fix that.

We tried to stand it up as a PoC, and we went back and forth with Microsoft on it for a few months. We never got to a resolution because there is an architectural design issue with the service itself, and Microsoft is not going to change their service for us. We tried to use it, and then we gave up, killed it, and went back to the original plan, which was to use Okta. Our goal is to eventually completely get out of the Microsoft Identity ecosystem and move over to Okta.

We do not use Entra ID anymore. We have moved away from Entra ID. We could not justify it from a business standpoint. That is the crux of the situation. We now have a solution that can meet all of our business needs.

Microsoft Entra does not provide a single pane of glass for managing user access. It is not fully featured yet. There are some things within that Entra ID administrator portal, but it is not as robust as simply going to Entra ID service and then going to different features that it has to maintain identities. It is not even a single pane of glass if you look at how Microsoft does identity between Entra ID, Azure Resource Manager, and M365 itself. I know that they are trying to fix the situation between Entra ID and M365, but the subscription-level identity access controls need to be moved out of the subscription level and need to be globally managed from the identity provider. I am sure there was a design choice for that, but it just does not work when you are a company of our scale because we just cannot keep managing individual resources, so we would like to centralize the identity system.

I used Microsoft Entra Permission Management in a very specific scenario but because we are a hybrid environment, we often found ourselves fighting with cloud groups. We moved a lot of security groups into Entra from our Windows AD environment. We have a lot of stuff that has been built upon that for the past 20 years. Not being able to have Windows Active Directory security groups that are synced to Entra ID to control access to resources was a big pain for us. We would have had to create a cloud group and then add all the members of those on-prem security groups to it, so we did not even bother with it. When you have a company of our age and our size and you have nested security groups, there is a lot of linkage there, and it is not attainable. 

It is great for mom-and-pop shops or small businesses that are truly coming into the enterprise ecosystem and that have not come from a legacy environment. Current statistics show that 99% of the world that was in an Active Directory authentication environment is still in the Active Directory or Windows AD authentication environment and just supplementing Okta, so we are not doing anything new. A previous Microsoft employee that I talked to said that in the last decade, there has literally been only one customer to get fully off their hybrid environment and go fully into Entra, and it took them over ten years. Therefore, Microsoft needs to focus more on Entra and fix not only the design flaws but also address a lot of the customers' needs. It has a lot of potential specifically around taking business from IIQ for some of those UAR workflows, identity workflows, etcetera. Their biggest competitor is Okta, and Okta is currently the better solution.

We have been trying not to use the solution. It is used for a specific use case, which is around authenticating M365, and we are trying to see if we can get out of using it, but that is only because our environment is extremely complicated. Entra ID is not battle-tested or stable enough to support a business of our size. There are some design issues specifically around support for legacy services. We used to be part of Microsoft, so we have about 15-year-old services sitting in our data center that still need to use legacy LDAP authentication. The way we currently have the environment set up is for one very specific domain. I am using a domain for specific context here to keep it simple. We have 36 Active Directory domains, and that does not include the child. We follow the least privileged access model. Our environment currently consists of using AD Connect to synchronize objects from our corporate tenant into Entra ID, and then from Entra ID, we wanted to stand up Azure domain services as a possibility for retiring legacy LDAP services. The issue with Entra ID specifically is that the way it replicates objects out of its database into the Azure domain services Active Directory tenant or Active Directory service is that it uses the display name. This is a bad practice, and it has been known as a bad practice even by Microsoft over the past decade, so the design is not good. The issue with replicating based on the display name is that when you are coming from an environment that uses a least privilege access model, where you want to obfuscate the type of security account being used by hiding it behind a generic display name, instead of myusername_da, myusername_ao, etcetera, to have an idea of what accounts are being used when they are logging in, it is unable to reconcile that object when it creates a new domain. If they all have the same DM, you end up with quadruplicates of each user identity that was replicated to it from the directory. Those quadruplicates or their same account names, as well as the display names within the cloud domain services directory, have a unique identifier with the original account name attached. What that does is that it not only breaks that LDAP legacy authentication, but it also drives up the cost for your customers because you are paying for each additional seat, additional user objects that are created, or additional users. You also cannot tell any of those accounts apart unless you dive deep into the user object to peel back what type of account that is to map it back to what came from on-prem itself, so the service is completely useless. What we have done in our case is that we do not really need Entra ID. We have Okta, so we use an Okta LDAP endpoint. That does exactly what we need in using SCIM, which is the technology that is able to take identities from multiple dynamic providers and merge them together into a single record. It is able to act as an official LDAP endpoint for the business, so legacy apps work. We do not have a problem. Microsoft could learn from that.

Entra should allow for external MFA providers rather than forcing you into a walled garden and the Microsoft ecosystem. Flexibility is a big thing, especially for companies of our size. A big issue for us is that we want the identity to be in Entra for sure, but we want it to come from Okta. We want the authentication and stuff to work, but we want Okta to control the PIM rules. We want it to do the MFA and all those things, but Entra does not play nice with others. Okta has engineered some ways to get it done, but it is not as full-featured as we would like it to be. Microsoft should do what they do with some other partners such as Nerdio and Jamf where they have their own version of a service, but they are still partnering with those other companies to at least add options on the market.

Fully customizable UARs and Azure Secure Identity Workflows would be great. Currently, you can do it if you cobble together a bunch of Azure functions and use Sentinel. If you are sending logs to Sentinel and are able to match patterns and run automation based on that, it would be great. They can help with a solution that abstracts away a lot of that complexity across multiple services into exactly what IIQ does. I could definitely foresee Entra being the choice for identity for pretty much all cloud providers if they can focus on the areas that SailPoint's IIQ does. A big pain point for a business of our size by being in Okta is that we do not have the same workflows that we have between IIQ and AD. With the amount of data that our company generates, we wanted Sentinel. I had their security department onboard, and it was going to be millions a month just to use Sentinel, but we could not use it, so we decided to leverage Splunk and a few other SIEM providers. 

They should also stop changing the name of the product.

We used it for a few months.

Microsoft's support has been so bad when we have had issues in Azure that we recently poured 24 million dollars out of our spend for Azure, cut our unified support agreement with them, and sent it to somebody else. I would rate their support a zero out of ten. It is so bad. We probably never had a support engineer solve our problem. Usually, I or somebody else in the company has to reverse engineer service to try and find the solution. The things that we find are not even documented on the Microsoft site. The second way is to pull the information from the blog of some old guy who found the same issue and ended up solving it. 

People on the support side at Microsoft just read from a runbook and then send us to another part of the world where they ask us the same question, read from a runbook, and then we repeat ourselves, so we sent all that support to Insight. They were happy, and they were way cheaper. It only cost us less than four million. It was significantly cheaper. Our leadership is like, "Wow! IT actually saved us money this year."

Negative

We were using Active Directory, and we will never get off AD. There is too much legacy stuff for us to even bother getting off AD. It is a very mature product. It would be crazy for us to leave Windows Active Directory for something else, even Okta. There are core things that we need to function a certain way, so Entra ID just does not make sense. Entra sometimes even has access issues and replication delays with identity and adding objects to a new access control list within its platform or service.

We are not a typical company. We used to be part of Microsoft, so a lot of things that we inherited were very complex, and we also do things differently. For the old NT systems and SMB shares, we are still using Active Directory groups, and they work just fine. We have automation built around membership. We control the membership of those groups, the auditing of those groups, and everything else, so it does not make sense. It would be too much work to move us over to Entra ID.

I was involved in its deployment. It was complex, but that was not Microsoft's fault. That was our fault because we have a very complicated environment.

We have a hybrid environment. We were in IBM, but we pulled back. We have Oracle's cloud platform, and we have AWS as well as Azure, but 99% of our cloud workloads are all in AWS.

When we initially started, Microsoft was not there. The initial implementation strategy was to synchronize the Windows Active Directory corporate domain to Entra ID. That way, we had the identities and we could use the same AD connector to synchronize the AD distribution lists. The other side was the mailbox. 

We did not take the help of any integrator. It does not require much. You stand up your servers. You have a staging host with its own database, and then a sync host with its own database. You then hook them up and make sure you have all the permissions in your previous tenant.

Microsoft puts MSOL accounts in some default directory. You should be able to tell the agent to put the MSOL accounts in a more secure OU. For instance, the original recommendation, which has changed recently, when we set up the service was to use an enterprise admin to set up the agent, which generates a bunch of MSOL accounts. Those MSOL accounts ended up in our all users' organizations. When you have a company of our size, that is not the only MSOL account that exists in the directory, and it is really hard to tell those apart, so we have to look through the logs, see which MSOL account it is using, and move it into the proper OU for the on-prem domain. It would be nice if you could determine where that goes at the time of creation.

We were able to reclaim the money that we did not spend with Microsoft and spend it elsewhere. It is technically an ROI, an investment of our time in negotiating other deals.

Microsoft is so expensive. You know it is expensive when a Fortune 100 company like ours is complaining about the cost. That has been a big thing for me. When I really want to use an Azure service, it is very hard for me to justify the cost, especially with Microsoft support. 

To those evaluating Entra ID, I would say that if you are on Windows Active Directory, just stay on it.

I would rate it a five out of ten. It is not ready yet. It needs focus by Microsoft.

We use Azure AD to manage users in terms of user accounts and profiles. We also use it to manage applications, access control, and application management.

Azure AD has helped improve the onboarding and offboarding process, especially with the user provisioning and SSO. With Azure AD, once a user account is created, the user automatically gets synced across all of our applications without the admin having to touch each application once at a time.

The solution helped improve our onboarding process by saving us a lot of time.

The feature I have found the most valuable is user provisioning (SSO). Azure Active Directory provides a single pane of glass for managing use cases. 

How it works is once it has all been set up, it allows the user to use the same credential – the username and password – across multiple applications. It creates ease of use for the user as they don't have to keep entering a username and password across multiple applications.

Azure AD allows us to manage the users' access from a single point. In a typical environment, if, for example, a user exits the company and the account needs to be disabled, you would have to go across each application to disable that access. With the Microsoft experience, you just have to disable it from the Azure Active Directory, and then it syncs across all of the applications. Once the account is disabled on the Azure, the accounts are disabled on all applications. The user instantly loses access across all applications without the admin having to go to each application one at a time. When you are offboarding an exited user or an employee that leaves the organization, there's no room for error in terms of missing out or forgetting to revoke an access for a particular application.

I would like to see Microsoft communicate how they intend to manage legacy applications. Right now, you still have to deploy a hosted domain server (which comes at an extra cost) if you have a legacy application that cannot sync properly with the enterprise applications and the modern applications.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for about five years now. 

Azure is stable. 

Azure is scalable. 

Microsoft's tech support is very responsive and really supportive. They will work with you if you have any concerns or if you have any issues. They have experts that will be able to jump on a call with you and assist you in making sure that whatever your concerns are, they all get resolved.

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution. 

The initial deployment was straightforward for me because I already had a pretty good experience managing the on-prem Active Directory. The deployment of the directory itself does not take long. However, it took us about a couple of months to carry out the user creation, create the Conditional Access policies, and to test. You have to test your policies before you go live. We had a lot of design to do in terms of setup, testing, rollout, and setup for each feature that we needed to implement. We had more of a test phase before the go-live phase. That's why it took quite a while. 

We did our deployment in-house. We had three people on the deployment. 

We have seen a return on investment from Azure AD because, first of all, we have been able to use the Cloud infrastructure to bring in more response. Also, it has high availability. We can easily scale it up or down, thereby managing costs. Now, in terms of the Azure Active Directory Office 365, we also have scale licenses where we get to manage the licenses across multiple users, thereby reducing costs of having to purchase one per user.

I would say that Azure AD's pricing is very reasonable because of the structure and in terms of the solution. I can offer this tip for the licensing: if you plan on going to a CSV, you can get a certain level of discounts.

We looked at Google Workspace when we were trying to migrate from on-prem to the cloud. At the end of the day, after analyzing and comparing most of the features that we are going to go with and how it will integrate with our existing system, we found the Microsoft Azure Active Directory to be more effective and better suited to our requirements.

This is how Azure AD stacks up against Okta. Okta is a third-party application for syncing user profiles from on-prem to cloud. However, Microsoft already has a pretty good application for that, which is Azure's AD Connect. It's more or less the same thing as Okta and more effective in the sense that with AD Connect we can actually get to query the user objects in terms of all the attributes to work on-prem and on the Cloud, just the same way you probably do it if you run an LDAP query. This is something you might not get with Okta because of the integration with the Active Directory.

My advice to someone looking to implement the solution is: your in-house technical support needs to understand the technology and your requirements as an organization because Azure is very robust. You need to know exactly what you intend to deploy and the requirements you intend or need. If you have that covered, Azure AD will be simple and straightforward to use. If you are able to plan and manage the users and services, it is really cost-effective.

I have identified that Azure Active Directory has a lot of features that are handy and useful. Microsoft is also constantly improving on it and it has all the required features that my organization requires. 

Azure AD is helpful and user friendly when it comes to managing identity and access tasks. It helps you manage that effectively because you have all the clouds, you have profile creation, you have all the features. Everything is easy to locate and simple to navigate.

Azure AD allows us to improve compliance for enforcing fine-tuned and adaptive access controls. It also allows us to manage access to all the applications in our environment. With it, we can create design policies that either the leader or the identify side from HR has to comply with before a particular user gains access into our environment or into a particular service within our environment.

We use Entra's Conditional Access feature in conjunction with Microsoft Endpoint Manager. We do so because one part allows for full control in the endpoint for managing access on the user and that user as an object, and then the other manages the device as an object.

This combination has the ability to reduce the risk of unpatched devices connecting to your corporate network. It will prevent a user from accessing an environment or a service space via a compromised device. If a user, for example, tries to access our network, service, or environment, via a compromised personal device, this combination will help prevent that kind of intrusion. Also, if a corporate authorized device gets compromised, that's when we find out the device is authorized to access that environment. It also helps to manage and restrict access.

Entra has helped our IT administrators and HR department save time. As a rough estimate, I would say it has cut our costs down by 20 hours per week.

Microsoft Entra has affected our employee user experience by helping to manage the end-to-end communication between user, device, and services by creating a very similar communication and very similar to the experience, which allows the user to be able to connect seamlessly to services and also to the device itself.

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  Azure Active Directory to provide all the identity services for all of our applications.

As a company, you want effective identity and access management. You are able to achieve this with Azure Active Directory, you are able to manage everything, such as building user provisioning into third-party applications, or single sign-on, and tools to mitigate threats or risky sign-ins. There are a lot of features that are provided.

The solution has some great features, such as identity governance, and user self-service. The Outlook application is very good and is used by a lot of people even if they are using Google services.

Azure Active Directory could improve by having an authentication service for laptops or desktop computers running Mac and Linux operating systems. They currently have authentication capabilities for Microsoft Windows. Having this capability would benefit people because in today's world everybody is working from the home environment.

I have been using Azure Active Directory within the past 12 months.

The solution is stable. There was one global outage that lasted approximately four hours in the past year.

Microsoft has different kinds of support you can have. If you pay then you will receive premium support which is very good.

I have previously used Google G Suite.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Azure Active Directory is more expensive than Google, but the capabilities they provide are superior.

I have evaluated SalePoint which is another very good product for collaboration that is available on the B2C platform.

The people who are considering Azure Active Directory should look at it as a whole because even if their company is using G Suite, they will still have to go to Office 365 for accounting and finance users who are very familiar with MS Excel and still want to use it. I see most of the companies that are using G Suite will have Office 365 for certain services. There is no need to have two services, a single Office 365 platform will provide all the capabilities needed.

I rate Azure Active Directory a nine out of ten.

Our use case for Azure AD is principally to do the role-based access management for our resources. So, we essentially use it for authentication operations for our primary groups and users to secure access to resources.

It has helped in improving our security posture. It is modeled around that. It is an AD, which means it is a directory of users, objects, and resources, and there is a lot of security in terms of the access model and in terms of who is accessing those resources.

In terms of user experience, it is pretty seamless for any user to use Azure Active Directory. The way its security model works is that once you sign in to Azure Active Directory, you get access to a lot of applications and systems that have Single Sign-on enabled. So, Azure Active Directory works seamlessly as an identity provider for many applications such as Slack, GitHub, etc. That's one of the best parts of it. If it is used properly, only by using the Azure Active Directory sign-in, a person can access different resources, which really improves the user experience.

We've benefited from all the security or AD features of this solution. Azure Active Directory is the only directory we've been using, and we make use of pretty much all the features, including the user identity protection features such as MFA. The way it allows us to audit who is logging in and do our work in a secure manner is one of the best features of it.

Azure Active Directory provides access to resources in a very secure manner. We can detect which user is logging in to access resources on the cloud. It gives us a comprehensive audit trace in terms of from where a user signed in and whether a sign-in is a risky sign-in or a normal sign-in. So, there is a lot of security around the access to resources, which helps us in realizing that a particular sign-in is not a normal sign-in. If a sign-in is not normal, Azure Active Directory automatically blocks it for us and sends us an email, and unless we allow that user, he or she won't be able to log in. So, the User Identity Protection feature is the most liked feature for me in Azure Active Directory.

Generally, everything works pretty well, but sometimes, Azure Active Directory has outages on the Microsoft side of things. These outages really have a very big impact on the users, applications, and everything else because they are closely tied to the Azure AD ecosystem. So, whenever there is an outage, it is really difficult because all things start failing. This happens very rarely, but when it happens, there is a big impact.

I've been working as a DevOps engineer for the last four years, and I have been using Azure Active Directory during this time. I got to know it really well over the last two years in my current job and as a part of my Azure Security certification, where I get to know how to secure everything in the cloud by using Azure Active Directory.

It is available most of the time. Only once in the last six months, we faced an issue. So, it is very reliable.

It is managed by Microsoft, so it is not something that is in our hands. We don't manage the infrastructure side and the scalability side.

My present organization is a startup with around a hundred people. There are 5 to 10 people who primarily work in the CloudOps and DevOps space, and we work with Azure Active Directory at some point in time. All people who have resources in Azure, such as the cloud administrators and people from the CloudOps team and the DevOps team, work with Azure AD.

In terms of resources, there are around 100 to 150 resources that we manage within it.

Microsoft has extensive documentation on its website about how to set up things in Azure AD. There are also video tutorials. So, typically, we don't need to engage technical support to do anything.

Only when there is an outage or something like that, we had to engage someone from Microsoft. For example, when there was an outage, we didn't know what was happening. There were some strange behaviors in certain applications, and that's when we involved Microsoft's technical support. 

They are very reliable, and they are very fast to respond. The response time also depends on the support plan that an organization has with Microsoft. 

I haven't used any other Identity Provider solution.

Our organization has definitely seen a return on its investment from using Azure Active Directory. It ties really well with the Azure ecosystem, which is why it makes sense to use Azure Active Directory to access resources.

Azure Active Directory has a very extensive licensing model. Most of the features are available in the free and basic version, and then there are premium P1 and P2 editions. The licensing model is based on how many users you have per month. In Australia, for a P1 license, the cost is 8 dollars.

With P1 and P2 licenses, you get a lot of goodies around the security side of things. For example, User Identity Protection is available only in P2. These are extra features that allow you to have a pretty good security posture, but most of the required things are available in the free and basic version.

I would definitely recommend this solution. I have been using it extensively, and it works really well. It is one of the best Identity Provider solutions out there. You have all the guidance from Microsoft to set things up, and if there is an issue, their technical support is highly available. 

It has been around for a while now, and most organizations leverage Active Directory as their on-premises identity provider. This is just Azure managing your Active Directory for you. It is pretty popular and rock-solid.

I haven't used any other Identity Provider solution, which makes it hard for me to compare it with others. Based on my experience and the things that I have done and learned over time, I would rate Azure Active Directory a nine out of 10. 

We are using Microsoft Entra ID every day for SSO authentication for our end users. We sync local active directories with Entra, register applications for SSO, assign licenses with dynamic security groups, and utilize it for enterprise applications.

The solution has improved our application security because we can deploy app registrations on our enterprise applications. We could securely enable MFA access on most of our applications.

Entra ID's ability to sync with the local Active Directory provides redundancy, allowing authentication via cloud features even if the local Active Directory faces issues. The SSO features with app registrations are also crucial, as we use Azure globally, allowing role and permission assignments directly from Entra.

I have used Entra ID for eight to 10 years.

The stability of Microsoft Entra ID is excellent. We haven't experienced any issues.

At the moment, it accommodates all our needs, and we have not encountered any scalability issues.

Previously, we used local Active Directory, specifically an on-premises solution.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I would rate Microsoft Entra ID 10 out of 10. It's a good product that's easy to deploy and manage, with no significant learning curve to adapt to various features.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The product is stable. 

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

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

Neutral

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

The product's price is in the midrange. 

I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

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

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

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

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

The key improvements to our organization are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Azure AD for approximately seven years.

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

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

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

Neutral

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