Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

We use it for authentication. Where we have cloud services, it syncs with Active Directory on-prem. We have about 1,800 people using it.

It's a very scalable solution.

The ability to manage and authenticate against on-premises solutions would be beneficial.

We have been using Azure Active Directory for about four years.

We have had very little requirement for technical support. It's a cloud solution.

We didn't use a different solution. We brought this in when we went into what was called Microsoft 365 in those days.

The setup was pretty straightforward. In terms of maintaining it, we have a team of six infrastructure engineers, and Azure AD is just one of the systems that they manage.

We did it in-house.

It's included within a wider bundle of Microsoft 365 products.

You need to make sure you've thought through how you're going to deal with your on-prem applications because having a hybrid solution like ours brings some challenges.

Ultimately, we will move completely into Azure AD, but we have a lot of on-prem applications and you can't use Azure Active Directory with them. Until we remove those applications and make things cloud-only, we will still need a hybrid solution.

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 the Azure portal to create users, assign rights, build policies, etc. I'm not an administrator for that part of our system but that is basically what we use Azure AD for.

Conditional access has helped us to better provide more security for our users and MFA has helped us to provide more security for users who are working from home. They use their own personal devices.

Azure AD has helped us to provide security for applications that I didn't have access to.

This product has improved our overall security posture. Everybody is working from home using a VPN. We recently migrated everybody to MFA, which is required to connect using the VPN. People are now more aware of their passwords and overall, gives them better security.

Using the Self Service Password Reset functionality has helped to improve our end-user experience because they no longer have to deal with the service desk to do so. It also helps the service desk because it relieves them of the need to help users when it comes to password changes, allowing them to focus on other things.

We use all of the services that are offered by Azure AD. We use Azure AD Connect, SSPR, app registration, application proxy, and more. We use everything for different services that include conditional access, authentication methods, etc.

Conditional Access is a helpful feature because it allows us to provide better security for our users.

I would like to see improvements made when it comes to viewing audit logs, sign-in logs, and resource tags.

We have been using Azure Active Directory for approximately six years.

In my opinion, the on-premises deployment is still king with respect to stability.

We are able to control what's happening there, unlike the cloud instances when the service is down. If Azure AD is down then it will affect the ability of our users to log in.

Both Azure AD and the on-premises Active Directory solutions are scalable.

We have approximately 30,000 objects hosted in Azure AD. Usage will be increased as need be, as we have more users and we have more objects to add.

I would rate Microsoft support and eight out of ten.

Support provides access to good resources and good backend tools that we can use to resolve issues.

We migrated to Azure Active Directory from Windows Active Directory.

In my previous organization, I was involved in the implementation and it was very straightforward. It was straightforward in the sense that we didn't encounter any major issues because we were already using Windows Active Directory. The only issue we had was that we had to move people in batches, and not at the same time.

Our deployment took approximately one month.

As part of the implementation strategy, we first moved our Exchange to Office 365. This was the initial migration of users from on-premises to Azure AD. The primary phase was to start using Office 365 for our email instead of Exchange.

We migrated from our on-premises Exchange solution to Azure AD with our in-house team. There are some of us in the infrastructure team, plus my manager.

In terms of our overall Azure experience, I can see that this solution yields a return on our investment. However, it is difficult to quantify.

The cost is billed on a per-user licensing basis.

We did not evaluate any other options.

I think that overall, using Azure AD is very straightforward.

My advice for anybody who is considering Azure AD is to look at the products, understand the role of AD, and see how it works in their environment. Then, before they roll out, test it well.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is that it helps with better organization and allocation of rights and security.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The solution is our main identity provider and federation platform. We use it for authentication and for federations, for some provisioning, and a little bit of governance.

It's a quite comprehensive solution and it scales quite well within our required scale as well, which is very useful.

The product has helped to improve our security posture. The Azure stack has built out a lot of analytics features. Now, we can more effectively investigate issues. 

The solution has positively affected our end-user experience by improving our usability and reducing friction.

The solution has certain limitations. For example, it has very little governance functionality. This is, of course, a choice made by Microsoft to see which areas they want to have deep functionality, and which areas they believe are more profitable for them. 

We've been using the solution probably since the mid-'90s when it was invented.

The solution has generally been quite stable. They've had some problems with the MFA and other things, however, they are a lot better at keeping the system stable than we are.

What we have seen is that we are running into some of the limitations of scalability. That said, we are more than half a million or 700,000 internal users at the moment. There are relatively few organizations globally that are as big as we are.

We're seeing, for example, that the parcel reset, to sync parcel reset from on-premise into the system is challenging. It's more than the 30 seconds that you typically want. It's even sometimes more than the two minutes that Microsoft promises in their SLAs.

We see that our syncing is slow. We have to run it every three hours, which causes problems with being able to service our business efficiently.

Those are the main problems I've seen. On top of that, there are certain features that have run into challenges, for example, the AEDS is not fast enough.

Technical support is actually quite good. It's rather rare that we have problems with support.

They have been very good at informing us about when they have outages. That's something we really appreciate as it saves us a lot of time. If something on their side is broken, they tell us so that we don't have to look to find any problems in our systems. That's one reason I really like the way they've been handling things.

The system we used before was IBM ISAM.

The ISAM setup was on-premise and it's very expensive to run and maintain. The support for Microsoft is much better, which is an additional advantage for us.

The initial setup was complex.

We have half a million users from 20 different offices. They've all got different ways of wanting to do things, including the way we have to build the federation infrastructure, for example.

This has been a four-year project, and we're probably going to continue with it for the next year or as long as we'll be using the product.

The initial build we did was a six-month build.

Our implementation strategy was to delegate sections, including delegating identity and federation setup.

We have five full-time personnel that handle the maintenance aspect of the solution. We have outsourced the actual hands-on maintenance. This firm has a couple of engineers, an architect, and an engagement lead. We have three solution delivery managers on hand, however, they do other tasks as well and are not necessarily dedicated to AD.

We used a systems integrator to assist with the initial setup. 

The product is priced quite well. The way that Microsoft prices per user and month is quite attractive to us. The level of the license cost is quite good as well.

We did not evaluate other options. Choosing Active Directory was a management choice. 

We are just a customer and an end-user.

I'd advise those considering the solution to find a good partner to work with. You do need to have an experienced system integrator with you when you do the implementation. The integrator we brought on did a good job on our side.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

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.

The most valuable features are

• authentication
• authorization
• two-factor authentication
• I have never had a failure.

It's multi-tenant, residing in multiple locations. Authentication happens quickly. Irrespective of whether I'm in Australia, the US, India, or Africa, I don't see any latency. Those are the good features that I rely on.

It also has a variable extension, which is an added value because in Active Directory, if you have to do a schema, you have to make changes on multiple Active Directory instances. But here, as the extension attribute can be done from the application level, it helps you provide the provisioning. 

Another good reason for using Azure AD is that it can connect with other SaaS services. It also has SSOs, which, along with the MFA, makes authentication much easier.

One area where it can improve is connectivity with other systems. Not all systems are connected and you have to do coding to establish a point of connectivity. It supports certain vendors and it supports certain protocols. It is limited in many other aspects at the attribute level.

Also, some of the provisioning filters are not capable enough. You cannot do a date filter on the provisioning.

Perhaps they could also have easy protocols to create the accounts. Instead of just a file upload, they should have an easy connector to do the provisioning part.

I work in a service-based company and I've been using Azure Active Directory for my customers for around 10 years now.

From 2020 to 2022, there have not been more than two or three outages, and none was more than three to four hours long. And those outages may not have occurred the whole time in the entire environment, they may only have been in certain places.

When there is an outage, the end-user experience is affected, but that happens in AWS and in Azure. It happens with any SaaS product. Overall, it has not affected the end-user experience, but when there is an outage in Azure, it will have an impact on our environment.

It's scalable, but if you need more than one region, you have to pay for it. You have to think about how you want the service to be available.

The technical support is good.

Positive

The initial setup is easy and straightforward. Setting up Azure AD doesn't require you to do anything. You buy the product from Microsoft and Microsoft sets it up for you. You just establish the connectivity to it. It does not take more than a week or two to complete the setup.

The number of employees you require for deployment and maintenance of the solution depends on how you have set up your provisioning platform. If it is automated, you can have one resource. If you're still in manual, then it depends on the volume of the workload.

Licenses are based on the usage. There is no cap. It's based on the number of users we provision.

A SaaS solution is the best product. You get it at a better price and you have many Windows-based services that are included for free.

I would definitely recommend using Azure AD. Many companies are moving from other vendors to Azure because every company uses Office 365 anyway for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. As soon as you use that, by default, you get an Azure AD account. If you have an Azure AD account, you definitely have features to use. Why would you want to go for another product?

Overall, I haven't seen any major issues with the product.

I use a Microsoft 365 cloud deployment and I have an organization where users are created. All of these users are hosted in Azure AD. I send emails in Exchange Online. 

For collaboration, we use Teams and SharePoint. Basically, all of these Microsoft products are on Azure AD. This is due to the fact that for you to use any of these products, users have to be created and these users are being hosted in Azure Active Directory. Without the users in the first place, the products are not used. 

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the ability to create users and host them in Azure AD. That is the bedrock - whatever it is you are doing, you're building on the fact that you have users created. We have Microsoft Teams to manage users and also to manage groups which allow us to manage collaborations and do all sorts of things.

Azure AD has features that have helped improve our security posture. It contains the Azure audit logs that allow you to also audit activities in the organization including those that have happened over a period of time. There is Azure sign-in that allows you to check for sign-in over a period of time for users.

From Azure Active Directory you can actually identify the IP address and run checks or maybe block the IP to improve the security posture of the organization.

The Azure sign-on and audit logs are very handy for a regular admin. They offer the most basic admin solutions to carry out activities on Azure security settings to identify potential threats and carry out some corrective actions on it.

We can use Azure Active Directory to deploy enterprise applications to incorporate third-party applications into the organization and make them available to users. You can put in place multilingual authentications and you can specify the kind of authentication you want to be available for your organization.

Most recently, you can use password-based authentication and multi-factor authentication, which allows for the ability to bring on third-party applications and to incorporate them and deploy them for users.

With Azure Conditional Access you can specify network locations where you want some of the services in the organization to be available to users, and where you don't want users to have access. You can customize and define conditional access to whatever suits the organization and based on what you want, including information protection. You can get conditional access depending on the license you have.

From my personal experience, I'd say that the features need to be more visible to make the product easier to explore for new users. They need to make it possible for someone with very little knowledge to come in and find things. The product needs to be more user-friendly. 

The solution needs to update documentation much more regularly. They need to just come out and update the documentation to reflect new features and make sure the updates are included in the already existing documentation so that someone like me can just pick up the documentation, read it, and know that it is very up-to-date listed and has all the new features contained within it.

I have been using Azure Active Directory Office 365 for over two years.

The solution is exceptionally stable. It's just a way to go on another solution, however, that said, I've noticed a 99.9% stability.

It's my understanding that the solution is very scalable. 

In my experience, I've managed hundreds of users on this product.

We can contact and support directly from the Azure Active Directory if we get stuck. As long as you are actually on the most basic billing subscription, you will be able to access assistance. That said, depending on the Azure license you have, you can get access to technical support for Microsoft Azure Active Directory.

My personal experience with using Microsoft support has been positive. I want to be fair, to be very honest, and the Microsoft support has to be one of the most agreeable out there as all you need to do is just submit the ticket and you get someone to contact you very quickly. They are always available. From the perspective of Azure Active Directory, as long as you have the required license you can contact the corresponding level of support. You can be sure of getting corporate support when you need it.

Previously, the organization had an environment where we managed everything locally. Azure Active Directory actually was our first entry into cloud solutions. We have not used other cloud solutions apart from Azure Active Directory.

The difficulty or ease of the initial implementation depends on the company and the level of experience as well as the level of knowledge of the IT team. The experience needed for cloud solutions is relative. I can say it's straightforward and even with a little experience or knowledge it is straightforward. The documentation is available and you can read and follow the documentation to handle the process. Of course, for new users, it could be a bit more straightforward.

For me, provisioning takes a few minutes - maybe between ten to 20 minutes. Normally it should take less than 30 minutes.

For this particular instance, we needed to add multiple users individually and sometimes as a bulk upload in the case of inboxes. Some needed third-party services. The documentation made the process pretty easy, however, when we did have issues, we could reach out to technical support to finish anything up. 

We have seen an ROI. It's actually cut some costs. Initially, we were using a local environment. Now, we've almost rid ourselves of one of our local environments. Moving to the cloud has saved us a lot of costs and actually, it's a very good experience. It's cost-effective compared to what we used before. It's better in terms of lowering our overall expenditure.

The prices are not too out of place. We're just gradually getting out of COVID and Microsoft is actually putting some renewals, licenses, and some products out just to cushion the effect of license costs as companies recover. With Microsoft, some products also offer free trials. 

We'd like to see more of a discount on existing licenses. They also need to consider having some free licenses, some free subscriptions.

I'm actually a customer. I have an environment in my home meaning I have a subscription that I've paid for. However, I also do consultancy based on the knowledge I currently have. I offer my knowledge to other organizations.

I would advise new users to allow open demos of cloud solutions and figure out what is on offer, what is available, or what can be made better. By doing a POC, you'll get to see resources used and what it's like to handle an environment entirely in the cloud. Organizations can consider gradually moving over or they can actually move completely to the cloud depending on what they want to do. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's a good solution, especially for companies following the trend of moving onto the cloud. There's always room for improvement, however, currently, they are doing very well.

The primary use case for Microsoft Entra ID is enterprise or company-wide system management. It allows us to join most systems, regardless of their location, to the active directory of the company's domain. This is particularly useful for managing PCs for remote workers and securing their devices.

Microsoft Entra ID has made managing users easier, as well as sending out policies and implementing restrictions. It simplifies the management of IT infrastructure.

The features I find most valuable are conditional access, privilege management, and dynamic groups. Conditional access allows us to set specific policies for security purposes. Privilege management enables us to assign specific roles to users, such as user administration, without giving everyone admin rights.

Microsoft often changes settings, and many features are scattered. It would be helpful if settings were grouped under a specific category, like authentication, to make it easier for beginners. The platform can be overwhelming for new users, so consistent organization of features is needed.

I have been working with Microsoft Entra ID for a good part of five years, migrating over from when it was previously named Azure Active Directory.

There can be outages or times when the portal is unresponsive, which is why I would rate the stability a seven.

I have not encountered any issues with scalability; it is for everyone. So, the scalability rating is ten out of ten.

I haven't raised any tickets with technical support, as I was part of the Microsoft technical support group.

Positive

No other solutions were used previously.

The initial setup is straightforward due to my experience, however, I would rate it a six or seven out of ten for someone new. Issues arise if users make incorrect choices during the out-of-box experience.

The deployment requires one person to create user profiles and assign relevant permissions, though two to three people may be needed for advanced features.

Business process-wise, Microsoft Entra ID makes managing users and IT infrastructure easier.

The pricing is fair compared to other products, and I would rate it a five out of ten for value for money.

No other solutions were evaluated.

For seamless integrations with other services, Microsoft Entra ID is likely the easiest tool. I would recommend it to others.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.