Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

We are using it for central management, MDM, SSO, MFA, applying policies.

In terms of the features that I have found most valuable, it is cloud based so it is always updated, that part you don't have to take care of. It is public cloud. It is actually AD as a service, so it's a kind of an infrastructure. It is more infrastructure as a service.

We had some issues with the migration of users from the local user accounts to Azure AD. It was more like a local issue and had nothing to do with the Azure AD itself. It works fine for SSO, the Single Sign On. We were not able to do the integration very easily with ADP, so that was a challenge, but later on it was resolved. We had to do a lot of things to have that on the configuration. Some systems do not integrate very well with Azure AD. We thought of going for Okta, but later on we were able to achieve it, but not the way we wanted. It was not as easy as we thought it would be, the integration was not very seamless.

Additionally, it would be great if they added support for more applications in terms of integration for SSO. That's the only thing that I find missing for Azure AD.

We have been using Azure Active Directory for the last six months. We didn't do any migration from on-premise Active Directory to Azure AD on the cloud. What we did when we were setting up the computers was to join users to Azure AD and apply some conditional policies and everything works fine. We don't have any issues. The only thing we face are some problems with some computers because they were using it locally and we had a lot of data. So when we did the migration to Azure AD, we also had to move all the user settings data, the complete user profile, to the Azure AD account, as well. That was a challenge, but I was able to use ProfWiz to move data between user profile.

There are not any bugs or glitches that I can recall. So far everything is working well.

Scalability is one of the reasons we selected Azure Active Directory. It scales very well.

For now there are almost a hundred users using it, but we are adding more.

We contacted support only one time and it was not related to SSO. We had some questions about their subscription and it was good.

When I was working with another company, we were using on-premise Azure Active Directory. We didn't want to invest in the infrastructure to maintain it, to get the license, so it was not very cost effective for us. We had a meeting with the management and saw that Azure AD would be very cost effective, scalable, and more secure, especially in terms of SSO and MFA, which were some of our requirements. We didn't want Active Directory on premise. It was not easy to do the migration.

The initial setup is not very difficult, especially if you start using it straight away. But if you do the migration, I think that might be a challenge. Fortunately, we started directly from Azure AD, we didn't have to do any migration from Azure AD On-premise to the cloud. It was pretty straightforward and easy. We didn't face any difficulties.

It depends on their requirements and what they are trying to achieve. One shoe does not fit all feet, so that's why it might be different from company to company. For us, it met all our requirements. It was very scalable, which is huge, and just always available. You don't have to be very worried about maintaining your own hardware, your own infrastructure, updating the servers from time to time or caring about securing your on-premise infrastructure. Azure AD is a good solution. I am satisfied with it so far and everything works great.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Azure Active Directory a nine.

I'm a computer engineering student in Portugal, and we used it during one of our classes for practically the whole semester. We used both the on-premise solution and the Azure, online one.

While we were learning, we used it primarily for user access management and also to define rules for the organization. For example, we created organizational units and defined domains for enterprise-level organizations. I was able to specify access to, for example, certain folders, including shared folders and shared resources.

We were using it in conjunction with SQL Server 2019.

Azure Active Directory works well to access the resources that the school has set up for the students. We can share between our groups, and we can set up shared assignments or shared project folders very quickly and easily.

We have access to shared storage space, which is great. It is managed through Azure Active Directory and appears to me as a Microsoft OneDrive account.

As an end-user, the access to shared resources that I get from using this product is very helpful. I also use it for my email, which is a domain that is part of the organization. 

The most valuable feature is the ability to define certain roles for the users and to give access to shared resources.

The options for user access management on the cloud are similar to those with the on-premises deployment. You can work directly on the cloud but control it from your on-premises server if you want, or you can make all of the changes directly on Azure.

One of the security features that Azure Active Directory provides is that it warns users about the usage of weak passwords. When we created user accounts and their passwords, it warned us about weak passwords and gave us the option to define password creation rules. We tested the feature and tried using invalid passwords, and it blocked access to the organizational units accordingly. We did not work with the more advanced security features within the scope of the course.

It has some good monitoring options that you can use to see how well it is working. In my class, we were able to see which users were accessing the solution, and what went wrong with the tests that we were doing.

The most challenging aspect I found was the creation of organizational units and specific domains. They have a tool called Bastion, which is expensive and a little bit confusing. I had to cancel the subscription because it was using my credits too quickly. For the students, it was not a very cheap way to learn it.

It would be helpful if they provided more credits for students who are performing test cases because we had to be really careful when we were using it. Making it cheaper for students would be great.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for one school semester.

Because we weren't using it on a large scale, it is difficult to estimate how good the stability is. That said, it worked fine for the small number of users that we had. Although it was not a good test, I think that it worked fine. It does have some good monitoring options, so we could watch the performance.

I do not have large-scale experience with this product, as I was using it for practice during my degree program. I don't know at this point whether I will be using it in the future.

In my class, there were half a dozen or fewer users.

In order for the solution to be scalable, it requires some upfront work. You have to well define the users, profiles, and roles that you want to have at your organization. We were already given some advice on that from our teachers, including which roles we should create and so forth. Once you have that done, I think it's pretty straightforward. You just have to add them through the interface that the solution has, and it's not very difficult to do.

I did not have to contact Microsoft technical support.

Our teachers explained what it was that they wanted us to implement and we were left to figure out how to accomplish the tasks on our own. When problems arose, I used Google to search for answers online. I also watched YouTube videos that included explanations and step-by-step tutorials.

Another solution that we learned about was the Apache Web Server. You can do the same things that you do with Azure, but it's more complex. You have to know a little bit more about Linux and you have to do it more manually.

In Azure Active Directory, there are already some default options available. That worked for us. It's easier for someone who doesn't want to have the headaches of understanding some of the more minor details.

For the initial setup, we mainly followed the tutorials that Microsoft has online. Initially, it was a little bit confusing because we discovered that there are many different versions of this same software. There are distinctions between an on-premise way of doing things versus a hybrid approach versus something that is on the cloud exclusively. There are limitations that each one of them has, as well as other differences that include mobile versus desktop solutions.

For a newbie like me, it was a little bit challenging to understand what the best approach would be. In this case, we were oriented by the teachers to implement the hybrid approach. When we were configuring Azure Active Directory for this, and also for the organizational units, we used the Bastion service. It is the one that creates the domains.

The deployment took perhaps half a day to complete the configuration, step by step. We had to make corrections between configurations, where we had made errors, which was part of the learning process. Overall, when you really know what it is that you have to do, it's pretty straightforward and quick to complete. Otherwise, it will take you a little bit longer.

From the documents that Microsoft has available, we understood that there are several ways to deploy this solution. There is an on-premises version, a cloud-based SaaS, and a hybrid option. 

We were using virtual machines with a license that was connected to our educational package. We have a product key, install it locally on the virtual machine, and that's how we worked with it. At that point, it was connected to the cloud.

Our Azure accounts are related to our college email address, and they are also administered by Active Directory.

We deployed it ourselves. With our small group and for the length of time that we used it, we did not perform any maintenance and I don't know how it is normally done on a day-to-day basis. Based on what I have learned, I think that one or two people are sufficient for maintenance if they know the product from head to toe.

Based on my experience, it would be difficult to estimate how long it would take to earn your investment back.

As this was being used in an academic setting, we were using the educational package. Azure has an educational package available for students with a variety of licenses and different software available. One of the applications included with this is the Azure SQL Server.

Each of the student accounts had an opening balance of $100 USD in credits. We used that to implement the solution and the code doesn't change if you are a student or a normal organization. Some of the things that we wanted to do were blocked by the organization, so we had to use our personal accounts. When we used our credits in this way, it was not specifically for students but for anybody who uses the service.

These credits are used on a pay-per-use basis and the price depends on the features that you use. The most expensive one that was relevant to our use case was Bastion, which allowed us to create and configure virtual subnets. Our use case required us to use it to connect our on-premises Windows Server with the cloud AD.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Azure AD is to study the basics. Get to learn how this access management solution works. We used Microsoft Learn and YouTube videos to assist us with doing so.

In summary, this is a complete solution for any company, but it requires some time and practice.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are a system implementer and this is one of the products that we provide to our clients.

We primarily use this product for identity and access management. Any of our customers using Office 365, which includes Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, are using it for authentication. Worldwide, there are a lot of use cases.

The identity check includes whether the username and password are correct, and it also supports multifactor authentication.

This solution is in the cloud and as soon as users log in to the Office 365 portal, or whatever application you assign to them, it will take care of the identity aspect.

The most valuable features are authentication, authorization, and identity access.

Conditional access is a very important feature where a specific user can be restricted such that they cannot connect to the application if they travel outside of the US.

Multifactor authentication is very important.

They have a velocity check, powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, where if you have been logging in at a location in the US but suddenly you try to log in from a different country, it flags it as an unusual amount of travel in a short time and it will ask you to prove your identity. This is a security feature that assumes it is a phishing attack and is one of the important protections in the product.

The problem with this product is that we have limited control, and can't even see where it is running.  If Microsoft can give us a way to see where this product is running, from a backend perspective, then it would be great.

I would like to see Microsoft continue to add new features gradually, over time, so that we can introduce them to our customers.

We have been using Azure Active Directory for more than six years.

The stability of this product is 100%, and we plan to continue using it.

As this is a cloud-based product, you don't need to worry about scalability. Regardless of the number of users, it handles identity management.

90% of our customers are using it. From what I see, we have up to 50,000 end-users. In reality, we can have up to 400,000.

We can handle most of the issues by ourselves but if not, Microsoft support is available and we just have to create a ticket.

This is the first cloud-based identity management solution that we have used. In an on-premises deployment, we use the traditional Active Directory.

The deployment process involves using the Azure AD Connect tool, which is very important. The only choice that needs to be made beyond this is whether you want to have single sign-on (SSO) enabled or not.

The deployment will require some basic planning. The length of time required will be a maximum of four weeks. Three staff should be sufficient, although this depends on the number of users.

The maintenance of this solution is almost zero. The only time that something needs to be done is in the on-premises portion of a hybrid solution. The cloud aspect is maintained by Microsoft.

As this is a cloud-based solution, less maintenance is required, so the return on investment is better.

The P1 version costs $6 per user per month. If you need the P2 version then it is an extra $3 per month.

There are two different Premium versions of this product available, being P1 and P2. For 99% of our customers, P1 is enough. The P2 version has some advanced features required by a small number of customers.

Overall, my experience with Active Directory has been very good. When we work in the cloud, this product provides us with almost everything.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

When we are deploying cloud applications we avail ourselves of the services of Azure AD. At the moment, we are mostly getting the data from on-premises to the cloud, as far as user entities go. We're trying to define policies based upon the company's and our projects' requirements, such as whether we need to make something public or private. This all has to be defined. We also use it for access management.

We have protected the entire tenant itself, as a federation. AAD has also become a great source of research.

Previously there were many tenants and many subscriptions within each tenant. We have been able to separate Office 365 as a separate tenant and not welcome any other applications into that. We are only using SaaS with that tenant. Later, we had different tenants, and we welcomed all types of PaaS and IaaS.

Recently, managed identities came into the market, and we are trying to adhere to automations and customization, the automation of groups, which is a major advantage. That way, people don't have to wait for a long time for manual intervention. If they raise a ticket, within a few minutes the answer can be in their mailbox with all the details.

The features I normally use are for authentication and authorization.

Single sign-on provides flexibility and helps because users don't want to remember so many passwords when logging in. It's a major feature. Once you log in, you have access to all the applications. It also enables us to provide backend access controls to our users, especially when it comes to groups, as we are trying to normalize things.

For the end-users, they can seamlessly log in to their web products, like their Outlook account. They have YAML services and SharePoint services. Everything is single sign-on and that makes them happy.

An area where there is room for improvement is the ease of use of the dashboards.

Also, if a user is working in India, and we suddenly see a login from the US, Australia, or New Zealand, we should be alerted, because we wouldn't expect that application would be used by that user in those locations at that time.

An area for improvement is that there is so much dependence on on-premises databases, in the on-premises directory services.

In terms of features we would like to see, we don't have domain controllers in Azure AD. We are also looking at how we can best migrate users from on-premises to Azure AD, and how we can welcome B2B users. We would like to see improvement in the B2B functionality. We hope that is already in the roadmap. We'd also like to see some functionality for how we can set boundaries for tenants. We have multiple tenants that we're trying to consolidate. It's definitely going to be a big challenge to consolidate two tenants, so we're looking for help in that area.

I have been using Azure AD for the last three years.

In terms of the solution's availability, I haven't seen anything negative. It's always available. There have been no issues.

I haven't seen any room for improving the scalability or performance. The capacity is good. We are managing about 5,000 users in Azure AD. We have an Ops team and there are about 10 people who maintain and manage users and groups for the production tenant. But in five months, with SaaS and PaaS services, that might go higher.

We have had many discussions with tech support for Azure AD. We are trying to install read-only domain controllers or ODCs into the cloud platform. We have had many challenges with that in terms of the network side and the business requirements. Another issue we have spoken with them about is how to do automation of service principles and of groups.

Support has been great, but there is a little room for improvement. We have had to go through many iterations and we have had to wait for a long time until the next version of the solution comes out. Overall, we get good support, but their timelines could be better.

We were using Microsoft AD, on-premises. We are now syncing all the users who are in the on-premises version to Azure AD. We are not directly creating users in Azure AD because of the dependencies. Many legacy applications are talking to the on-premises directory services. When a user is created, we are sending that user from the on-premises to the cloud through Azure AD Connect.

We are using the Premium P2 licensing. 

To explore the solution, I had to create a personal version, because I can't play with the access that we get from the company. We explore those services in the personal version first, to see how it reacts.

From the company side, we haven't had issues because the licensing works well. But on a personal level, if I could enable more trial services, at least for a year, it would be much easier to explore and suggest the best solutions.

It's an easy tool to explore if you have already worked with the on-premises data services. There is good documentation available on the Microsoft website. If Microsoft provided more time for new users to explore new features, that would help. Everyone could learn more and contribute more to their companies or to the projects that they're working on. But it is easy to learn.

Just be careful, because you are in the cloud. You have to be aware of access, AM, how the user is coming into their account, where the user is going and what the user actions are, and what access they have. Always try to enable single sign-on, so that if any fraudulent user comes into the picture, you can remove them as soon as possible. So enable those features for admin accounts and use privileged IT management, vaulting the password. You have to strictly follow the security standards, because it's open to the public when it is on the cloud. You have to be very careful about the project requirements, the end-user requirements, and what the business stakeholders need.

When we started with Azure AD, we didn't restrict much. Later, we restricted a few possibilities, such as users logging in with their social accounts, or email accounts like Yahoo accounts or Outlook. Initially it was open to all. Any user could invite a guest user and provide access, but later we restricted things with conditional management, and restricted users so that they could not connect to their Gmail accounts. We are coming up with more policies as well.

We have ongoing discussions with Microsoft Azure AD regarding how we can best protect our entities and what the behaviors should be. We have some more specific requirements in the company, related to project behavior. With IaaS, you have to welcome everyone. You have to put virtual machines in the cloud. You can use the password services and develop custom APIs and deploy them. 

We are trying to define our security policies as much as we can, as we are seeing many changes in the market and are trying to restrict as much as we can. Only users who are least privileged can have an all-access. The most privileged will have additional authentication. We're trying to differentiate.

We have to be very careful about the administrative part, so that operations can easily manage without any hassle. Because we don't have natural restrictions, we are trying to implement our own rules.

As we are moving to the cloud, we have to be very careful when it comes to Azure Active Directory. If there is a mistake and a random user can log in to the directory, they could have access to everything. A user should not have access to whatever he wants, so setting up the right level of authentication and authorization is important. Use IAM very effectively. Identity and access management is a powerful space where one has to be very careful in choosing and configuring policies and standard procedures. We're trying to define that and be careful when with all platforms, whether IaaS, SaaS, or PaaS. At the moment it's going well.

We are merging many things in the tenant. Before, we only had SaaS. We are trying to welcome PaaS and IaaS to use the same production tenant. We have to exercise caution for everyone, all the individual policies, groups, and service principles. We have to enable all the features that you are capable of, such as user sign-in permissions, and application sign-ins. That has to be continuously monitored.

We have a good rapport with Microsoft. We have good support. We'll be exploring all the new services, like the managed entities and their other services that have come up. We are trying our best to explore and use the latest features that are available.

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 primarily use the solution for most of our enterprise identity management. 

It's improved our company through the security policies. It's helped improve our security posture. 

It's pretty easy to implement. In most of the apps nowadays, it has the ability to use multifactor authentication, SSO.

The control is great. It offers good conditional access.

It helps with managing user access via one pane of glass in most cases. 

The security policies we are applying are pretty well structured. 

The solution is nice to use. Microsoft did a good job.

My assessment on Microsoft EntraID admin center for managing all identity and access as our organization. It's great. It's very well organized, pretty straightforward, and easy to use. It's not just that it's easy to use, it's very intuitive. Everything is easy to find. 

We use Microsoft Entra ID conditional access features and improve the robustness of our zero-trust strategy to verify users. 

The permission management feature is good. 

The visibility and control are very good. The whole intro ID concept is pretty intuitive. Even if you have never used this and you have some experience in IT, you will be able to handle the solution easily.

It's helped our IT department save time. It also helps with speeding up processes. I can't speak to the exact amount of time saved per week, however.

The solution helps the company save money. 

It's positively affected the employee user experience. 

It's just been renamed. That said, I can't speak of room for improvement. There may be areas that could be better, however, I haven't thought too much about that. 

I would change the device access a bit. It's very difficult. I would add some features. I would like to be able to authenticate Wi-Fi users using the Azure ID. However, my understanding is it needs to be from both sides, from the vendor that is creating devices for the Wi-Fi and for the networking part and Microsoft. 

The company has been using the solution since before I arrived. I have used it for around four or five years. 

The solution is stable. I've never seen big issues. It's pretty much a stable product. 

Sometimes Microsoft has small issues, however, nothing that would cause the entire company to not be able to work for a whole day. 

More than 1,000 people are currently using the solution. 

It is a scalable solution for sure. 

I've never used technical support. 

I've used a few different solutions. Mostly I've used Active Directory. It does the same thing; it has just been renamed. 

I was not a part of the implementation. It was done before I joined the company. 

It may require a bit of maintenance, however, it's not a task that is part of my department. 

I don't deal with pricing. It may state the cost online. 

I did not evaluate other options. 

I'm a user.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. I'd advise others to use it. Even the free tier has a lot of features that even a small company would benefit from. 

This solution is useful for user management because it is integrated with DNS.

The solution is deployed on cloud and on-premises. We're using the latest version.

We have about 200-250 users. All of our users have local and Active Directory. We don't have plans to increase usage.

It's user friendly.

The solution could be cheaper.

We have been using this solution for about five years.

It's stable.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support is good.

Installation is straightforward. It only took a couple of hours to set everything up.

We pay a yearly license. Licenses are very expensive.

We primarily use the product for the authentication for all of Office 365. It is also my single sign-on solution.

The solution is stable.

It's a very easy product to set up.

The product can scale well.

Technical support has been great.

It's an affordable solution.

The synchronization with my AD is not the best. The synchronization between my AD and Azure AD needs improvement. For example, for reports, et cetera, due to the fact that now I have two different ADs - one for local AD and another for Azure AD, the types of fields in the local AD do not sync with Azure AD. It's completely different.

I've been using the solution for four or five years at this point. 

The product is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. The performance is good. 

The scalability is great. You can expand it as needed. We have about 2,000 users on the product right now. 

We've used technical support in the past. They have always been excellent. We're quite happy with its capabilities. 

Previously, I used Okta. I switched to Azure AD due to the fact that it's part of Office 365. It does not have a cost. It's not exactly free; it's part of the Microsoft bundle.

We found the implementation process to be quite straightforward and simple. It's not overly complex or difficult. 

It's pretty inexpensive to use the product, as it comes with the general Mircosoft bundle. Its costs are baked into using Microsoft in general. It makes it pretty affordable. 

I'm an end-user of the product.

We're always on the latest version of the product. Being on the cloud ensures we are always up-to-date on versions. 

I'd rate the product at an eight out of ten.