Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

The primary use case of this solution is single sign-on, and if a company is going to use Azure AD, a lot of what they are looking for is to manage those sign-ins and logins and have a single place for it to be.

I've been in the Azure space since it started out and in the Microsoft Cloud AD since the BPOS days in the early 2000s, and it's just a product that made life simpler for my clients to be able to integrate everything.

The self-password reset if its enabled and configured properly, really helps a company be able to reset rather than getting IT involved. 

Additionally, the capability of adding that single sign-on for other pieces that you might want to run through Azure Active Directory, such as Office 365 or Salesforce or any number of different third party authentications that you need can be done through Azure Directory Premium.

One of the things with Windows 10 as a company client's software is that they're using it on laptops, desktops, or whatever. In Active Directory Premium, you can control the sign-in and the spaces where documents might be kept on that device with Active Directory Premium and the rights management piece.

Documentation I think is always the worst part with what Azure's doing right now across the board. You may run into an issue you get a technician that says, "Here, look at all these links through self-documentation, and then make comments to it if you want to change it or do something." It's just that the documentation itself, is not very friendly to somebody who is just going in to it. If I had to turn it over to a customer, I just don't think that documentation is that friendly to somebody who does not have in-depth knowledge.

Three to five years.

My impressions of the stability of the product are that it is a pretty good product. I have seen one outage in the last three years, where it just would not work. It only lasted an hour. It was a pretty big deal, but other than that it has been very dependable.

It scales really easy. It's just adding more scales. It is eally easily as far as number of users are concerned, if you're talking about scaling into other apps or other things that you have. Again, there's a configuration curve there. But, if you're scaling applications or services, then there can be a little more difficulty in that.

It's hit or miss. I've had more success in the last probably eight months than I had prior to that. If there's one downfall to their tech support, it's too compartmentalized. So if you're talking AD Premium, and again, with all of the different pieces to it. If you have a single sign-on issue, you might get a different technician than you would get for a joining a VM to Azure AD or whatever. They compartmentalize their tech support, and I will say to myself, "Well, just give me a guy that knows what's going on." But, then they get very compartmentalized in their tech support. They have to bring somebody else in, or have to research or do whatever. So, that's the one criticism that I have. Response has been excellent. They get you well within their SOAs, depending on what you've got paid for tech support.

It's pretty straightforward depending on what your needs are.

Licensing is easy.

The biggest piece of advice is if you're planning for all applications that need authentication, and making sure that all applications that need authentication or that you're going against, that you're using the premium parts of Active Directory for, are compliant with the solution and not finding out afterwards.

We have a hybrid environment where we sync our users from on-premises to Microsoft Entra ID. The main purpose is to utilize Microsoft applications and services, like Microsoft 365 applications. We also use different integrations with Microsoft Entra ID for other cloud-based apps like Salesforce, enabling Single Sign-On integration.

One of the best features is that if users are synced with Microsoft Entra ID, you can integrate different enterprise-level apps like Salesforce, Oracle, and CyberArk. There are hundreds of apps you can integrate. Enabling Single Sign-On using Microsoft Entra users with these other cloud apps is a significant advantage. Single Sign-On is highly valuable.

Microsoft could enhance features regarding user retention for inactive accounts on Microsoft Entra ID. Another improvement needed is in the report customization for enterprise application configurations, making them more graphical and suitable for management presentation. Additionally, the freedom for Group Policies needs enhancement in Microsoft services like Intune.

I have been using Microsoft Entra ID for 6 years, and it is now going to be 7 years.

Microsoft Entra ID is a stable solution. We have been using it for the last 7 years, and it continues to improve with feedback from customers. It is a very stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. We previously had 300 users and now have 1,000 users. The number of licenses has increased, and Microsoft Entra ID has helped manage various Microsoft services under one platform.

Microsoft's technical support can be rated as 7 for front-end support and 8 for tier-two or advanced level support. Sometimes, level-one support lacks the immediate information needed, causing delays in receiving appropriate support.

Neutral

We were using Microsoft's on-premises Active Directory and a different Endpoint Protection. Now, we use Microsoft's Endpoint Protection due to licensing benefits. We also switched from another system to Microsoft Dynamics. These changes have helped reduce both capitalized and operational costs.

The setup process was relatively straightforward due to Entra Connect, which syncs on-prem users to Microsoft Entra. However, managing Group Policies in Microsoft services is still somewhat complex.

We engaged integrators, resellers, and Managed Service Providers for various projects. These service providers supported our deployment.

I cannot provide a specific figure, but moving our CRM and ERP to the cloud has reduced the need for on-premises management, saving on both capitalized and operational costs. This transition has allowed us to reallocate budget to more productive activities.

Licensing with Microsoft 365 often comes bundled, which simplifies license management. This unification reduces the need for separate licenses for Office applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Before choosing Microsoft Entra ID, we evaluated other security and identity solutions, including Microsoft's on-premises Active Directory and different Endpoint Protection systems.

I would rate the solution as 9. It is a very good solution for unified management. I rate the overall solution a 9 out of 10.

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.

We manage local users in the Microsoft Entra ID environment. 

The tool's most valuable features are security and integration with other tenants. 

The product takes at least ten minutes to activate privilege identity management roles. 

I have been using the product for two years. 

The tool's stability is good. 

Microsoft Entra ID's support is good. 

The tool's deployment is easy. However, documentation is not helpful. 

The product is cheap. It is free for our tenant. 

I rate the product a seven out of ten. 

Azure AD helps us manage application and hybrid identities.

I like Azure AD's conditional access policies. Microsoft Entra provides a single pane of glass for managing user access, improving the overall user experience. 

The workflow management for registering new applications and users could be improved.

I have used Azure AD for about eight years.

Azure AD is stable.

Azure AD is scalable. 

Azure AD is so stable and easy to administer that we don't need to contact support. 

Setting up Azure AD is straightforward. 

I rate Azure Active Directory a nine out of ten. You should use premium licenses or Azure directly whenever possible to take advantage of the new security features since E3. 

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.

We primarily use the solution for MFA; to access apps such as Teams or Outlook, two-factor authentication with our mobile phones is required.

We also use Authenticator to assist our clients with re-enrolling, moving, and adding new devices. 

The solution helps us keep our data secure and prevents security breaches, malware, etc. The app also provides us with options regarding our authentication preferences.

The two-factor authentication provides an additional layer of security for our organizational data, so Microsoft Authenticator plays a crucial role in making our confidential data more secure.

The solution offers multiple authentication methods via text, call, or the app. This gives us many options and flexibility when it comes to MFA.

Our users sometimes experience issues from having multiple Microsoft accounts, which can cause some confusion and hassle.

It would be good to see the incorporation of fingerprints and Face IDs as authentication options. This would simplify the authentication process for end users, especially those who aren't as tech-savvy. It is also a consideration for visually impaired people, for example.

We have been using the solution for about one and a half years. 

Microsoft Authenticator is a very stable application; our only issue is that we run into the occasional bug.

The solution is highly scalable. Many organizations use it around the world. 

The technical support is very good. 

Positive

I used PingID when working for another organization, which is slightly different from Microsoft Authenticator.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but the solution is straightforward to use once installed. 

The solution requires a little maintenance, as we sometimes encounter bugs where the app doesn't recognize a user account, for example.

I am not involved in the pricing or licensing, so I can't speak to that. 

I would rate the solution a 10 out of 10.

I would advise potential users to familiarize themselves with the basics of the solution; how to set up an account, how to use the app etc. It's always a good idea to have a clear reason for using a particular solution, how it functions, and what role it fulfills.

Active Directory is used for authentication and provisioning for users and devices and granting them access.

We're in a hybrid mode where we still have on-prem controllers as well.

The beauty is that it affords us more of an anytime, anywhere operation because we're not tied to an on-prem solution. From a customer experience standpoint, users don't really care about what goes on behind the scenes technically. They just want their lives to be easier. Now that they can access Office 365 globally, anywhere from any device, that's huge. That helps productivity and gives them the ability to get work done. And having to manage fewer passwords and user IDs is another true advantage.

The solution gives users seamless integration to all these products and streamlines the user experience. That's definitely been a pro.

In this completely upside-down world that we're in these days, with most people elsewhere and very few people in the office, it gives us tremendous flexibility for keeping people productive and providing them with access to the data and tools that they need to perform their jobs. It has given us the opportunity to move to this more mobile environment.

Also, the SSO aspect improves our security posture because people aren't writing down or creating a list of all their passwords. Now they only have to remember one. It has definitely made it easier for them to manage. In addition, we've introduced MFA so that whenever you sign in, you're also challenged for approval on your mobile device. That adds to the security.

The single sign-on across multiple platforms is really the true advantage here. That gives you one ID and password for access to all your systems. You don't need to manage a plethora of different user IDs and passwords to all the systems that you're going to access. 

The downside is that we now have all our eggs in one basket with Microsoft. We have this great authentication and single sign-on, but if Microsoft has an outage in North America or globally, on Outlook or Teams, we're dead in the water. There is no drop-back-and-punt. There is no "Plan B." The bottom line is that if their services go down, our productivity goes with it. Working with them when we have outages can be very frustrating. We get some type of hiccup once a quarter.

We get service notifications from them all the time that the services are under investigation or that there is some type of issue. More than the headache of not completely understanding the severity, we have to make sure that we communicate with our end-users. We get to the point where we're potentially "crying wolf." We're telling them there's a problem but some people don't have the problem. Then they get to the point where they just ignore our communication.

Outages can last hours, but never more than a day. They can be regional outages where one area is affected and other areas aren't. The advantage is that it could be evening or night in the area that is down, so it's less impactful.

I've been using Azure Active Directory at my current company for just about four years.

My impression of the stability is mixed. If it were really working correctly, it should be able to digest these outages by rerouting us to other areas. But that doesn't happen.

We have a global footprint, so it scales globally, no doubt.

Tech support from Microsoft has been cumbersome for Office 365. We don't really get the answers we want in a timely manner. There are times that we get the runaround, and that's the downside to being an early adopter and being on the leading edge. Sometimes we have to sometimes QA and work out issues with their products, which I'd rather not have to do.

A larger shop, like a Goldman Sachs or a JP Morgan, is not going to adopt this stuff until it's mature. And that means that smaller companies, like ours, have worked out the kinks.

Neutral

Before AAD we used the on-prem version with on-prem controllers. We went with AAD because there was no other option. We had their on-prem solution, and in the evolution directed by our CTO, everything is moving to the cloud. The next logical next step was to move to AAD.

I didn't set it up, the guys who work for me did it. I think it was fairly complex because we're about to go through an acquisition and we are going to merge them into our tenant. We have to outsource some of that work to a third party to assist us with that because we don't have the in-house skills.

Costs are constantly being managed. We don't really have a choice. It's the one shop in town. If you want this, you have to pay for it. We have an E5 license, which I believe is the most expensive license.

From an AAD standpoint, I don't think we've had any issues. The data replicates correctly and no one really has a problem with their credentials from AAD. It's meeting our expectations.