Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

The solution is a hybrid cloud with connectors into Azure/Microsoft 365 cloud.

I am still figuring out the whole on-prem/Azure Active Directory Premium/Microsoft 365 integrations and administrative connections.

The scalability of the solution is good.

Technical support can be helpful.

It's not intuitive and we use it mainly for our hybrid capability now and are expanding our footprint in Microsoft 365. The integration between on-prem and Online is interesting. However, the learning curve is high.

When you have an Office 365 enterprise subscription, it comes with Azure Active Directory, however, you don't have an Azure subscription. Yet, all of our active directory connectors put our credentials into the Azure Active Directory. 

There are enough things that aren't implemented on our side and we are in the middle of this transition.  I don't blame the product necessarily for that. However, there are links and items within Microsoft 365 that still point back to the .com side.

Items seem to continue to move, such as security and compliance. Now there's a security portal and a compliance portal, and all three are still being maintained, however, one's being phased in and the others are being phased out. Things continue to change. It's just been a bit to learn. There's a lot to keep track of. There should be a bit more transparency.

The Office 365 subscriptions are a bit confusing with a hybrid environment with what credential has an Microsoft 365 subscription.  However, then some of the documentation I was reading this week was where I ran into a wall. This particular document clearly showed that when you have a particular ability on the Azure side, and then you have another ability on the Office side, intuitively the Microsoft cloud knows to give you certain other rights, to be able to do stuff. This settings and configurations are in different places. Some things are then in the Exchange Online, some things are in the Intune section, etc.

I am not sure if the intent is to have an Microsoft 365 administrator with a second subscription for a cloud admin account or not.  I was trying to do something in Exchange online and received a message that I couldn't do it because I didn't have a mailbox. It's frustrating and confusing at times. There are things like that just are a different user experience between on-prem and online.

The Microsoft Premier Agreement we have has been very beneficial and we have had an excellent experience with a couple of different short cycle projects.

We've been working with the solution for just over a year and I have been involved for the last five months. It's been under a year, and not very long just yet.

The scalability seems to be there.  We are not a very big shop but we have unique needs and requirements.

The premier services we have are very good. We have a contact that's been with Microsoft a while and that's really saved us. The reach back into field engineers and their amazing ability to get the job done have been hugely beneficial.  The Exchange Online engineer we had was worth double what we paid for. It was amazing. If it weren't for that, I am not sure if we would have made our schedule.  Often the timing hasn't lined up, with short notice compliance requirements and implementation constraints due to configuration or version of technology.  They are very responsive, but depending on if it's break fix or planning, the planning side as longer cycles.   

I wasn't a part of the initial setup. I can't speak to how long the deployment took or how easy or difficult the process was.

We had assistance with the setup. We're actually bringing in some more help as our needs have short turn cycles and some ageing infrastructure that we still have to move online.

I would say to make sure you have a trusted integration partner or someone on staff that has been through this transition.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

While we use the on-premises model, we also have it synced for hybrid functionality.

With COVID especially, there have been a lot of changes in a lot of companies and a lot of rethinking of processes lately.

We're in the process of rolling out Office 356 internally. We've had really great feedback that people really like Teams, and we want to move more into that area. We had a roadmap meeting with Microsoft a few months ago. It was probably five months ago, four or five months ago.

Some of the more accessible types of items were on the roadmap for the first quarter of this year. However, Microsoft's working hard at listening to customers, especially through the COVID situation that changed a lot of work and priorities. The collaboration stuff has changed. They've been pushing a little bit more on getting some more integrations. We're not going to have that kind of clout where I am, however, where I used to work, we would have. We were the ones that were making sure the Exchange got upgraded and got to the developers.

I would rate the solution at a six out of ten. If the solution offered better transparency/clarity I might rate it higher.

We primarily use the solution for our AD. Azure AD and Microsoft Entra ID are basically the same, they are currently rebranding. I basically manage users and permissions.

It's made it easy to manage our users. It's also easy to deploy across the company. It pulls over the Exchange and does everything together in one go. You just have to get the licenses.

The login process is easy. It's very user-friendly for users. We can check the logins and handle user management. It's quite simple and easy to use.

It provides a single pane of glass for managing users and access. It's easy for users to handle multiple devices. It makes the sign-on experience better. It can easily teach users how to use the authenticator app.

I'm able to get reports on the database to help give visibility to security. I don't handle security, however. I'm there for support. People can use the data to perform investigations. 

The ID is quite useful. The Azure ID admin center can manage all identity access tasks across an organization. We can easily set up users. It's something you need in every company. Most of the basic stuff is done for users.

The Verified ID is useful for authentication. You can set it in your privacy settings. 

The solution has helped us save time.

The experience overall has been good for employees when they need to get an ID. If you need an extra license, it's just a matter of clicking one button.

We'd like to be able to link to non-Mircosft products, like Linux. There isn't much open source that links up with Azure. Most open source, however, can link up with AWS.

I've been using the solution for four years now. 

The solution is stable. it's dependable. 

We have about 100 users on the solution. 

It's easy to scale up or down. It does what it needs to do. You can always edit or delete resources as well. 

We haven't had any issues. Therefore, I have not really dealt with technical support. 

Positive

I was also working with Microsoft Active Directory on-prem. I'm new to this company; I've worked with other things in other companies before. 

I've used Okta in the past. I find the Azure pricing more user-friendly and I find it's better in terms fo team collaboration. For example, with this, you can also implement Microsoft Defender which can help you monitor users as well.

We have it deployed to the cloud; it's too expensive to maintain on-prem hardware. 

I was not directly involved in the deployment of the solution. 

Only two people have to maintain the product. 

The pricing is expensive. It's in US dollars. I'd rate the affordability of pricing six out of ten. 

I'm not sure if the company evaluated other options. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. My advice would be to stay virtual and not on-prem or you'll have to pay more.

We use Microsoft Entra ID primarily to reconnect all of our Windows laptops. It is our centralized location for access to pretty much anything web-related. Everything you log in is MFA activated. We've worked on conditional access policies in it as well.

Microsoft Entra ID has improved our organization because we now utilize a single source of truth for authentication. We have less management, and I can point everything to Microsoft Entra ID. I have fewer people talking about resetting passwords, the MFA pieces, and more single sign-on.

I'm not attaching or having to authenticate on separate apps, which has greatly benefited us. We are able to route things into Microsoft Entra ID. I create one ID, I create groups that manage the security side of it, we plug that in, and it works great.

The most valuable features of Microsoft Entra ID are the login and the conditional access pieces. The login helps me identify who went where, why, and what problems they may have encountered. The conditional access allows me to control the flow of user access.

The private access is the next big thing for us, and that's one feature I'm going to try in public preview and probably move towards. There is no great solution in the cloud for Conditional Access authentication and RADIUS-type authentication.

I have been using Microsoft Entra ID for four years.

The solution's stability is very good. We've only had one minor outage for a few hours.

The solution's scalability is really good.

The solution's initial setup is fairly straightforward. The biggest issues we had were syncing it to the on-premises Active Directory and doing local things like RADIUS.

We implemented the solution with the help of a consultant named Steeves and Associates, and our experience with them was really good.

We have seen a return on investment with Microsoft Entra ID. The solution has dramatically reduced the amount of time spent on activating accounts. I was the first system administrator at the company, and we've got four now. It's definitely a growing arena, but it's an understanding that I can see that progression. I don't have to teach them all these different things. We just do one thing and move on.

Everything costs money in a tough market. As a nonprofit, we have A5 licenses for nonprofits in education, so we at least have some reduced costs. Looking at Copilot and a bunch of other features that are coming out, we'll have to seriously consider that cost-to-value ratio.

Since we all use Windows laptops, choosing Microsoft Entra ID made sense. I think there's a cohesivity in what Microsoft is trying to do, and Microsoft Entra ID is a very core function of that strategy. It's easier to branch out to other security products, making it easier for us to expand that landscape.

Microsoft Entra provides a single pane of glass for managing user access.

Because of the solution's single pane of glass, we don't have to run around to multiple places, mainly to create or remove accounts. One of our biggest issues, especially in the past few years, is turnover. Removing accounts is a big issue because we don't know where everything lies. Trying to find those little corners where access has been granted and not knowing it for a year or two after the employee has left is a huge security concern for us.

Our HR department doesn't use Microsoft Entra ID yet, but the IT department extensively uses it. It saves all that account creation, and we don't have to run around to different products. The solution has saved our company at least a few hours a week. We can focus on other projects, and I can educate most of my staff who are doing it in other areas.

Microsoft Entra ID has not necessarily helped our organization to save money. As a nonprofit, we didn't have any solutions, so it probably started costing us more. However, I think it's paid off just by this security nature of things and having that single pane of glass.

Overall, I rate Microsoft Entra ID ten out of ten.

We use it for identity and access management for cloud-based applications.

A couple of features are valuable, but the one that comes across the most to me is multi-factor authentication. That is huge because, with the promise of cloud—the ease and flexibility—comes a challenge of security. That means organizations are quite susceptible to cyber security threats and attacks. Nowadays, because assets have moved from the on-premises environment to the cloud, identity has become a new parameter. 

MFA is the most valuable feature because it only takes threat actors who keep guessing the password—even a password with a high degree of complexity, given all the tools available to crack them—to gain access. Then they are able to steal identity information and all the digital assets of an organization. 

We, ourselves, experienced a "near miss" but we were able to detect it at a very early stage and then immediately implement multi-factor authentication, which of course means that in addition to the regular user ID and password, there's another key requirement for validating and verifying the true identity. That's been very valuable to us and to our clients.

We also use Entra’s Conditional Access feature to enforce fine-tuned and adaptive access controls. It's all about taking a further step and layering additional controls to prevent unwanted access. It helps with Zero Trust, ensuring that we can protect assets. The entire paradigm is to make sure that you do not grant access to any potential user without verifying and properly validating who that entity is. That's most invaluable because you can identify a set of conditions that are unique to the organization. They can be related or linked to the profile of the organization and, based on that, you can grant access. Microsoft, from what we've seen, is at the forefront. They're actually spot-on with that.

Using wild imagination, I am thinking about to what extent AAD can integrate with products in a seamless way, such as applications that are running on-premises and making use of on-premises directory services. The most common, of course, is Azure Active Directory Domain Services. To what extent can it be used to replace the on-premises Active Directory Domain Services? Even though they are similar in concept, they are totally separate products. 

I would like to see applications that make use of on-premises Active Directory Domain Services have the ability to also seamlessly make use of Azure Active Directory.

And when it comes to identity and access life cycle management for applications that are run on-premises, as well as access governance, if those kinds of capabilities could be built into Azure Active Directory, that would be good.

I have been using Azure Active Directory since 2015.

It's very stable. I don't think I can recall a major outage of Microsoft's products or services. 

There could be outages impacting other services, and over time, you do experience degradation. But what makes it work is that Microsoft has a lot of resilience built into its cloud architecture.

It's highly scalable. I've worked on projects where we have to deploy Active Directory for in excess of 12,000 users.

More than 90 percent of the people in our organization are using Azure Active Directory.

Overall, I'm satisfied. In some cases, there are incidents that take some time to resolve, but those are more exceptions than they are the rule. We seem to find such cases when we have situations with on-premises workloads, technologies that are not yet in the cloud.

But for the most part, in recent times, on average we tend to have quicker resolutions, relatively speaking, for issues that have to do with the cloud product. 

What I consider to be the aspect that makes the experience good for us is that we get support for all the products. We have access to Premier Support and that enhances the quality of our experience.

Neutral

It's quite easy to set up.

The time needed to set up Azure Active Directory is a function of the environment. For simple deployments, it can be done within hours or within a day. But for complex environments, it might take anywhere from two weeks and up. You need to go through an environment assessment and make use of a project delivery framework.

For example, suppose a customer already has on-premises Active Directory services, and the requirement is to deploy or implement a hybrid identity architecture. That means there are workloads on-premises and in the cloud, and the customer wants to use the same identity scheme or single sign-on. Those are the type of requirements that determine how long it will take to get Azure Active Directory set up.

Deployment generally requires a project manager, an engagement manager, and an architect; a minimum of three people. And if there are other specific solution domains that require specialist skills, it could be four.

There is zero maintenance. The focus, in my own experience, is typically around security: how you're monitoring the environment to ensure that it's still secure. And when there are incidents, to what extent, and how quickly, you can triage and pinpoint and remediate to keep the infrastructure secure? But the actual is maintenance is zero.

It will save us money eventually, even though that's not the case now. For example, for HR, with onboarding and exits, we're beginning to see that this is an area where Entra can help us manage the life cycle of identities. The convenience that comes with that, and how that also helps ensure security and compliance, are areas that Entra can help us with.

The pricing of Azure Active Directory is competitive. By default, the product exists in almost every Microsoft cloud product. But it then depends on the features that a customer really wants to make use of. The extent of the security requirements will inform what kind of plan will be suitable for the customer's situation.

As a business, we have always been cloud-native, so we've always been making use of Azure Active Directory. The very fact that that's what drives our productivity platform, both for ensuring that employees are well engaged and they can deliver on productivity, and meet customer requirements and demands, means we haven't looked at alternatives.

Regarding Entra, the expectation is that when it is deployed, the employee experience should be better. We haven't started exploiting all the features of Entra. It makes use of the core Active Directory: identity and access management, conditional access, et cetera. But we're not making use of all its features at the moment. We hope to implement them in the near future.

Overall, I'm satisfied.

The primary use case is for the authentication of the users. We actually onboarded around 3000 to 4000 users at our go live, which are various application users from across the US and the other regions.

The best feature is the single sign-on provision for the various type of users. That is our sole purpose for working on that and utilizing that service as creating a custom solution for a single sign-on would be difficult when we have around 50 applications within our company that has been used by users across the globe. That includes North America plus Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. It is very difficult and complicated to do things on our own. Instead of doing that, we just acquired the service from Microsoft for single sign-on, and for that purpose, we are using the Microsoft Azure Active Directory authentication.

From our utilization perspective, they are providing almost everything. That said, the customization, like the data sharing between the application, is something that needs to be improved from their side. For example, we are sharing certain types of data. We have a container application structure, so we have a single sign-on application where we are using the Active Directory authentication, and when the user clicks on that application, the information of that user is passed to the child application, and the child application does not authenticate the user again. That is a single sign-on concept, which is available across 50 applications within that container. We pass a lot of various types of data, therefore, there's a limited capability of doing that in Microsoft Azure as, on the Azure Active Directory, we may be able to create some additional attributes, however, there are certain limitations.

Technical support could be better.

I haven't explored all aspects of the solution just yet. There's still more to look at.

We've been using the solution for as far as our last project, in which is currently being used. We have been using it for the last four years.

This is a stable solution. Since our product went live in 2017, we never got an issue with respect to authentication.

The product is scalable. It is not even region-specific. You can change the region. For example, if you want to target European users, you can simply purchase a plan for a European server or something like that. Currently, I know that our application is running in the United States region, and our targeted users are from the United States, so our application is working in the North American region, the east area.

Technical support is a thing they need to improve a lot from their side.

The engineers from the Microsoft side are professional, however, the thing is they're working on the shifts. For example, if you encountered an issue which is affecting our production application, and we talk to a guy from Microsoft in Central Standard Time. While he will be available then if the issue is ongoing for more than eight hours, which exceeds their standard working hours, he will just put a hold on the call and will say that my next representative will get back to you on this issue, and when the next representative arrives you kind of need to start over.

Neutral

The Active Directory just plays a role in authenticating the user, and it doesn't do anything else, just authentication. The services where the deployment is being done, that is a different thing. It is an application service in itself. We have an Azure Active Directory service. Besides that, we have application deployments or application services on Azure as well. That is a separate service, which is used for the deployment of the application, so when a user is accessing the application, he is redirected to the Microsoft Azure authentication application where the authentication is being performed. So far, the authentication has been performed, and that user is being redirected to our actual application, which has been deployed on the Azure service. Therefore, there isn't really a direct deployment per se for this product.

I'm not familiar with the pricing aspect of the solution. The client deals with that end of things. My general understanding is that it is quite expensive.

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten. They do have an outstanding service compared to the competition. 

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.

Usually, it is replicating an on-prem Active Directory environment into Azure. It is usually tied with generic email access and SharePoint Online access and building out provisioning for that. There typically is some sort of synchronization tool that is sometimes used in addition to or as a substitute for the typical Microsoft suite. So, it just depends upon the customers and how they're getting that information up there.

In terms of version, it tends to be a mixed bag. It just depends on the client environment and factors such as the maturity and the rigors of change management. Sometimes, it just lags, and we've dealt with those types of situations, but more often than not, it is more of a greener field Azure environment and tends to be the latest and greatest.

It certainly centralizes usernames, and it certainly centralizes credentials. Companies have different tolerances for synchronizing those credentials versus redirecting to on-prem. The use case of maturing into the cloud helps from a SaaS adoption standpoint, and it also tends to be the jumping-off point for larger organizations to start doing PaaS and infrastructure as a service. So, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service kind of dovetail off the Active Directory synchronization piece and the email and SharePoint. It becomes a natural step for people, who wouldn't normally do infrastructure as a service, because they're already exposed to this, and they have already set up their email and SharePoint there. All of the components are there.

Its area of improvement is more about the synchronization of accounts and the intervals for that. Sometimes, there're customers with other network challenges, and it takes a while for synchronization to happen to the cloud. There is some component of their on-prem that is delaying things getting to the cloud. The turnaround time for these requests is very time-sensitive. I don't mean this as derogatory for this service, but in my experience, that happens a lot. 

For the Active Directory component, there are some value differences and things like that as compared to on-prem. I have run into problems a few times when there is a custom schema involved with their on-prem installation. You can use it, but that custom schema or functionality is going to have to go somewhere else or rerouted back to on-prem.

I have been using this solution for probably two and a half years.

It is perfectly stable. I haven't had any concerns or any problems with that.

I have dealt with them. Overall, tech support is great if you have something that was working but it's broken and needs to get fixed. It is a different bucket if you have more of an implementation question like, "Hey, can we do this?", or "How to approach that?" Sometimes, it can be challenging to get the right people on that call to support those conversations.

Its initial setup really depends on the customer. I have one customer right now with a super simple environment. They're just replicating it up. It's all Microsoft stack top to bottom with no real surprises or anything else. They're happy as pie with that. 

I have larger customers who tend to want some sort of management layer on top of it for Active Directory management purposes. This tends to go into the cloud, which introduces its own little challenges. In a more sophisticated enterprise, I start running into custom schema or workflow dependencies that just don't translate well from on-prem to cloud, but it is rare. It usually ends up being a third-party solution that we route them to with that. So, it's not huge. The challenge is more in identifying that. Typically, as much as we try, we rarely get it identified early enough to change our statement of work or our implementation, so it becomes a bad surprise.

Its price is per user. It is also based on the type of user that you're synchronizing up there.

I would advise spending more time on planning and aligning your business processes with Active Directory and Azure in terms of custom schema and separating third-party accounts, external accounts, or customer's accounts from employee accounts. I've run into issues when people take an existing on-prem solution that has third-party entities or maybe external customers and start synchronizing it up. It is not a slam against the service, but that's where I start recommending people to do different instances of Azure Tenants to break that up a little bit and provide that separation. All of these are planning functions. Using this service can be deceptively easy, but you should spend more time on planning. Around 80% of it is planning, and the rest of it is the implementation.

I would rate Azure Active Directory an eight out of 10. It is super solid. I wouldn't say it's the best. I would love to have everything that you could do on-prem. I understand why it can't do that, but I would love that flexibility.

The primary use case is collaboration. So it's all about federation of identity and permissions.

Identity is one of those things that you need to be separate from your actual tenant. There's a benefit for it being separated from your actual tenant for reasons of security and containerization. 

It's very easy to run and it's part of their ecosystem and I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon.

Back in '96, '97, '98, nobody was doing intake. So that was a new thing that came in 2000. And it created the container based inherited permissions, which was new for that stage. Before that it was very static, there wasn't inheritance, there wasn't assertions. Then they introduced that and they've slowly built it, and then it just got too big and old, and really the database that MT's on is just vulnerable to all these attacks. And that's primarily why they want people to get off it. There's about four or five open attacks that make it very easy to both intercept the credential requests, and also attack the database itself.

The ability to speed up delivery is a nice benefit, because rather than having external dependencies there's a certain guarantee that if you use anything within that technology platform. Whether it's full of applications, or various other things, there havee already been regression tests by the vendor. And you don't see the same defects that you get when you have integrated systems.

The fact that it's an ecosystem in itself is probably the best one. It fits into the whole Microsoft stack. Everything this year is all about stacks, and I tend to agree. The inter-operability  and complexity of things these days is just too big. These things change too much. So you don't really want to be stuck between three technology stacks that are changing. If there's a defect, you won't know which one it's in. Trying to hold the service provider to account is quite hard. I'd probably say, yeah, stay with the stack if you can.

I guess price would be the thing, and some of the proprietary lock-in. But, I guess documentation and support would be good.

The features are fine. I wouldn't suggest any features because you can keep adding to it. But, its simplicity is that it works under its own ecosystem. It's nice and reliable. If you start adding all these extra things to it, it'll probably cause complications with some of the legacy things that are still slowly just hanging onto them. But, to look at more documentation, engineering, or an open standard would be nice.

It's like any technology. It appears that if it did have stability problems they don't really exist anymore in the same way. It's like any introductory development technology. Because its identity, it has to be perfect. It is either secure, or it's not, and unfortunately there's a million ways for things to go wrong and there's only one way for things to go right when there's no give. You do see a lot of issues with it at the beginning.

It is mathematical. So, it's like most things. Took a while to get the XAML certificates and all that sort of stuff working. But,now it's a very common thing. You get a session certificate on your phone when you're doing things. When you join a session on your browser on your mobile phone. It's just very common things now.

I'd say there's about 5,600 users of this solution in our organization.

There are set rules. But, it's a security mechanism. If you try and get your swipe card pass for your office, and then you try and integrate it with one across the road, they're literally being designed not to integrate with each other by design. This is because if you want it secure, you don't want to have it integrate. The same thing works with changing the posture of something after you've initiated it. Expect this sort of behavior.

The tech support is OK. I'm talking more about the engineering structure of it. As I said, you can understand why security things have a tendency to not document it, because it's one of those things. Do you want more people to review it and make it harder, or do you want to covet it and reduce the exposure of it?  It's catch 22. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't. Doesn't matter which way you go.

We have prior experiene with Novell. 

It's easy in its essence, but part of the ease is like anything that seems easy is generally complex when you try and fix it because you've skipped over so many configurations. It's like a wizard that you go, "Yep, it's done." And then it breaks, and you say to yourself, "Oh, hang on, I clicked one button. How could I have done that differently?" It's a lot more stable than it used to be. They've got into a maturity plateau where they're not developing it anymore within for reasons of functionality and the product doesn't really break much.

There's no such thing as a "free lunch." If you'd save money here, it costs money there. If you pay more upfront, you pay less when you get off. The market equals itself out, like a free market. So, it generally does. It's more about convenience at the end of the day.

As a user, I'm not an owner of the tech, so as a consumer, even if I am a specialist, I still don't own the technology. I just want to lease it, subscribe it and make sure that the owners of it are able to meet the facilities of it in its life-cycle.

There's a couple of other options on the market like Okta, and a few things like that. They're quite simple, and because they're separate from the whole Microsoft ecosystem, they do have some benefits in that they're completely focused on only that product and only that requirement. With Microsoft, they're like an octopus. They have so many different requirements and priorities that sometimes they don't invest all their energy into the products that you have expectations to investigate.

Last year Microsoft had said that the onsite Active Directory ,as we know it, is going to be deprecated. So that means group policy, that means security groups, the NTLM and all that  we've relied on for so long is going to come to an end with this modern management philosophy. That's why I did those group policy changes. From group policy, which is essentially the ability to control the operating environments of managed devices, rather than that, Microsoft wants only a mobile device management policy. So it's pretty much a HTTPS or SSL assertion to manage devices off the domain, and they will all come from Intune.

So, they're not going to be managed by a set of static policies. They're going to be set by a whole heap of compliances. Does that make more sense? It's not conforming. It's when you assert yourself, and us for a particular requirement from the domain. They check your requirements per request, which takes the load off the environment quite a bit. So they only validate you when you ask.

It's a lot easier to get an engineer to understand the Microsoft stack then some esoteric random "Joe." There's just are not enough people in the field.

You're better off creating a pilot tenant on your own. You can set up one that's free using one of their 30 day trials, and while you're doing that try and make it as realistic as you can to the environment you're coming from. Make sure that it is true in terms of network, commissuib and integration. If you're going to use a MDN for mobile device management, or you're going to use applications for the federated sign-ons. Try and get as much as you can in it. You've got 30 days and they're quite liberal with allowing you to trial it.

Most of the capabilities are there internally. You can't expose external DNS names or anything and use it as an external platform, but internally you can. So spin up a VM or something internally and do the same things you would. I'd dare say: test it and prove it. You've got to prove it to yourself before anybody. I wouldn't trust anything from a brochure or anything else. Your reputation's on the line. You're doing something important for someone else and you've got to verify it yourself and put it through the paces. Spend enough time doing proof of concepts and pilots.