Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

I am an operational engineer and consultant that assists organizations with their Azure Active Directory implementation. I primarily deal with administrative functions in my day-to-day tasks. I am responsible for creating and configuring Azure AD users and groups, as well as assigning the dynamic membership required by the organization to their users. Another common task is that I set up guest user access for organizations that want to grant access to users on a temporary basis.

For customers that want to use a cloud-based deployment, I can assist them with that. In cases where the customer wants an on-premises deployment then we will provide them with help using AD Connect, which is used for synchronization between cloud-based and on-premises data.

This solution helps to improve security for our clients using a specific directory structure and by using a variety of options. There is a default directory, which is owned by Microsoft, and in there you can create custom directories for your use. 

There is a panel available for the administration of users, groups, and external identities. 

Options are included for uploading your on-premises applications to the cloud, and they can be registered with Azure. This means that you can also create your own applications.

Identity governance is available for paid users.

Using Azure Active Directory has benefitted several of my clients, with an example being a startup organization. Startups have three or four things that they need to do in order to begin work. First, they need a domain, and after that, they need a DNS record to be created for their domain. For instance, these services are provided by godaddy.com or similar vendors. Once these steps are complete, they connect to Azure AD with the help of the DNS record that was created. At this point, Azure AD performs the role of a Platform as a Service. Once Active Directory is connected and verified, you can create the users and groups, and begin managing your processes. 

These are the only steps that are required for a startup. For an enterprise that wants to migrate its on-premises data to the cloud, there are several additional steps. For instance, you need to create a virtual machine and install your server. Alternatively, if you already have a server, it can be connected with the help of AD Connect.

This is a good solution for end-users because the vendor provides good documentation and if the users experience errors or issues, they get a popup alert to explain the problem. Furthermore, it can provide a solution to resolve the issue.

The most valuable feature is Identity and Access Management. As an IT administrator, this feature allows me to manage access for users and groups.

This product is easy to use and easy to manage.

The application policies, licensing, and AD Connect options are valuable.

Multifactor authentication provides more security. Having a user ID and password is compulsory but after that, you can add different security features. For example, it can work with biometrics such as fingerprints, retinal scans, and facial recognition. There are many more options that may suit you better, as per your requirements.

When you log in to the Azure portal, there is an option available called Resource Groups. Here, you can add multiple things including printers and different servers. There are Windows servers available, as well as servers hosting many different flavors of Linux. Once a server is created, you can add in a database, for instance.

There are four levels of subscription and the security features are not available for free. At the free or basic level of service, Azure should provide identity protection features including single sign-on and multifactor authentication. These are the most important features for organizations and everybody should be able to utilize them for working remotely.

I have been working with Azure Active Directory for approximately three years.

Worldwide, Azure has many servers available and in fact, they are the largest cloud organization in the world. As long as you are paying for the service, you don't have to worry about availability. There is a Microsoft backend team available that can provide you with what you need.

The availability is the best in the cloud industry.

You don't need to create or manage your own infrastructure, as it is handled by the Azure team. Also, through the Azure portal, you can add databases.

This is a scalable product. You can scale it to any number of users and any number of servers, and there is no issue. As your organization grows day by day, you can increase your users, your databases, and compute services including RAM, CPU, and networking capabilities. This will ensure availability on the platform.

If you are part of a very large organization, with between 50,000 and one million users, then you might generate between 500 and 1,000 terabytes of data each day. You have two options for uploading this data to the cloud, including an online option and an offline option. In the online option, you use a gateway. The offline option includes Data Box, which is a device used to transfer your data. These hold 800 terabytes and above.

I have not used technical support from Microsoft myself. However, it is available and they can provide proper resolution to problems that people are having.

The support documentation that is supplied on the web page is very good. If anything changes then there is a section for notes in the documentation that explains it.

Using technical support is a more cost-effective solution than hiring somebody to maintain the product full-time.

The initial setup is not a complex process. It is simplest in a cloud-based deployment and it will not take much time. If your current server is on-premises then you only need two things. One is your enterprise domain users, which have full access permissions. The other is a global administrator on the cloud side. Both sides need to be integrated and this is done with the help of Azure AD connect. Once this is complete, you can have interaction between your on-premises data and cloud data.

It is helpful to have a basic level of understanding of the product prior to implementing it.

We provide support to our customers, depending on the error or issues that they are having.

There are four different levels of subscription including the free level, one that includes the Office 365 applications, the Premium 1 (P1) level, and the Premium 2 (P2) level. There are different options available for each of the different levels.

Everybody can get a one-month free trial.

This product is cheaper than Amazon AWS and Google GCP.

I do not use the other Active Directory solutions, although I do check on them from time to time. One thing I have noted is that the Google platform charges you on an hourly basis. In the case where you need a virtual machine for only one or two hours, this is a good option. However, if you forget to log out of your machine, then the cost will be large.

AWS provides you with a one-month free trial so that you can test using the resources.

At this time, Azure AD is the biggest cloud Platform as a Service that is available. They have 60+ cloud data centers available worldwide, which is more than any other organization. It is a service that I recommend.

My advice for anybody interested in this product is to utilize the free trial. Microsoft will not charge you anything for the first month. They will also give you a $200 credit so that you can use the services.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We provide a pipeline for Azure Active Directory. We are working with premium clients, giving them services, like SaaS application services through Azure Active Directory. Also, we help external clients who are planning to migrate from on-prem to Azure Active Directory. We help them with the setup, etc.

We are providing Office 365 access from Azure Active Directory. We are enabling multi-factor authentication and assigning the licenses for end users.

We can provide access for many SaaS analytics tools, like ERP and CRM. We can provide access from everywhere to Azure AD. So, it will work as an authentication service, then we can provide access to particular SaaS applications. Therefore, we manage all accesses and privileges within Azure AD for different applications.

The Privileged Identity Management is a good feature. The identity products of Azure Active Directory are good features. 

There are role-based access controls. Both built-in and custom roles are very useful and good for giving permissions to a particular set of users. 

Privileged identity access lets you manage, control, and monitor permissions of a particular set of users or group. This is a good way to control the access. With the rollback access control, that will secure your environment, e.g., if you want to secure it from an authentication point of view. So, if you are an authentication provider service, your request will go for authentication, then it will go back for service authentication. So, this is a good feature in Azure Active Directory.

Azure AD has features that have helped improve our security posture and our client's security posture. We don't have to manage many things because there are some built-in features inside it. We can set it up once and it will work as an auto process, which is good from our side. On the clients' side, it will then not be challenging when managing stuff, as it will be very easy to manage the client end.

Azure AD needs to be more in sync. The synchronization can be time-consuming. 

The availability is good. I have never experienced any downtime.

The scalability is great. If we will go with the custom installation version of Azure AD Connect, i.e., for many users, then we can go with the custom settings. 

I have one client with one tenant. We verified their domain and created many users. It was already on-prem, so we synced all the users from on-prem to Azure AD. We gave those users Office 365 permission from the Office 365 admin center. From there, we enabled the MFA and assigned the licenses. 

We have migrated 10,000 to 12,000 objects from on-prem to Azure AD previously.

Whenever I have logged a case with Microsoft, their technical support replies within 24 hours with an email and a call, which is good.

Previously, our clients only had on-premises Active Directory. They migrated to Azure AD because they didn't want to keep their on-prem environment. There are a lot of challenges with maintaining those servers and other costs. 

It is also a good service. From one console, we can manage many things. It is better if we can work with it from a single console, managing it all with fewer resources. With on-prem, there are many domain controllers that we need for various stages, and we have to manage all the domain controllers. Apart from that, we have to back up and monitor the server as well as do everything for the setup. 

It is a very easy process to set up. First, we need to collect all the information, e.g., the custom domain information, user information, and which kinds of applications the users want to access. All this information is needed. Based on that, we can just set up and go to the Azure Portal. We can go to the Azure Active Directory console from there, where we can verify the domain and do the management. It is a very easy process, which is not time-consuming. Though, if you want to design your own application (customize it) and provide access for a particular user or group, then it can be a bit of a time-consuming process.

I don't think more than one or two people are needed for the deployment. If we have all the information, then we can work alone. Not many resources are needed for this.

Azure AD has a good return on investment. We do not need as many servers, electricity, etc. We can save from a cost point of view. Apart from that, if we have a limited set of users, we do not need to go with the extended version of Azure Active Directory, where it costs a lot to enable these services. Azure Active Directory is a good option compared to on-premises. 

This solution is less time-consuming. We don't have to hire as many resources to give permissions to a particular user or group for any application.

We are working with the Premium P2 licenses, which are reasonable. If you invest in the on-premises environment setup, then it costs so much. However, on-prem AD gives you the ability to manage your organization in a very organized manner, where you can create a group policy.

Azure AD provides identity access. If you have to go with the identity part only, then Azure AD would be the better option. If you will go with the various authentication authorization and security services, like group policy setup, then on-prem Active Directory would be better.

It is good service and easy to use.

I would rate the solution as a nine out of 10. They should be improving the solution all the time.

We have deployed an Active Directory model with Active Directory on-premises, and that is providing services to the entire organization. In 2018, we wanted to implement single sign-on with some of our cloud solution partners. That was the main reason that drove us to implement Azure Active Directory. As far as I know, that's the only thing that we use Azure Active Directory for at this moment.

We can call it a hybrid system. All our internal operations are using Active Directory on-premises, but when we need to identify some of our users with applications on the cloud, that's when we use Azure Active Directory.

We are a mid-size company with around 550 users end-users, with the same number of end-user machines. We also run somewhere between 120 and 150 servers.

The reason we implemented it is that we can use it for authentication with some of our service applications, and that makes users' lives easier. They do not need to learn a lot of different passwords and different usernames. The other benefit is that, on the management side, it's very easy because you can have tight control over who is using the application and who is not; who has permissions.

For some applications, it's not only working for authentication but it's also being used to apply roles for users. From the management perspective, it's much better to have this because in the past we constantly needed to go into the console of the different solutions and create or delete users or modify their roles and permissions. Now, with Azure Active Directory, we can do that from a single point. That makes our management model much easier.

As a result, the solution has helped to improve our security, because user management control is very important. In the past, there were times when, for some reason, we forgot about deleting or even creating users for certain applications. Now, because we have only a single point for those processes, there is better control of that and it reduces the risk of information security incidents. That's especially true when you consider the case where we had forgotten to delete some users due to the increasing number of applications in the cloud. We now have five or six applications using single sign-on and that capability is one of our requirements when we introduce a new solution. It has to be compliant with single sign-on and it should have a way to be implemented with Azure Active Directory. It makes our infrastructure more secure.

Among the applications we have that are using single sign-on are Office 365, Concur for expense control, we have an integration with LinkedIn, as well as two other applications. When a user decides to leave the organization, we check that their access to all our internal applications has been closed. That can be done now with a single script. It makes it very easy for us to delete the user from the organizational unit, or from where the group linked to the application.

It makes things a lot more comfortable in terms of security as we don't need to log in to every single application to delete users. We would see, in the past, when we would run a review on an application in the cloud, that suddenly there were, say, 10 users who shouldn't be there. They could still be using the service because we didn't delete them. For some applications it's not that bad, but for others it could be an open security risk because those users would still have access to assets of the organization. We have reduced, almost to zero, the occurrences of forgetting a user.

Azure AD has affected the end-user experience in a positive way because, as I mentioned, they do not need to learn different usernames and different passwords. In addition, when users request access to some of the applications, we just need to assign the user to the different groups we have. These groups have been integrated with the different cloud applications and that means they can have almost immediate access to the applications. It makes it easier for us to assign roles and access. From the user perspective that's good because once they request something they have access to the service in less than 15 minutes.

Implementation of single sign-on with other vendors is quite easy. It might take a couple of hours and everything is running.

We've been using Azure Active Directory for over two years.

The availability of Azure AD is good. I don't have any complaints about it. Regarding the stability, we haven't had any issues with it. We haven't experienced any service interruption. 

Part of our strategy in the short-term is to move most of our Microsoft environment, when it's feasible, to the cloud, because we have seen that the cloud environment offered by Microsoft is really stable. We have proved that with tools like Azure Active Directory. In almost three years we haven't had a single issue with it.

From time to time it takes a little bit of time to replicate, with some of the applications—something like five to 10 minutes. I know that the design is not supposed to enable real-time replication with some of the applications. But, as an administrator, I would like to run a specific change or modification in Azure Active Directory and see it replicated almost immediately. It really only takes a few minutes. Although it doesn't seem to cause any problems for our organization, I would like to see more efficiency when it comes to the different connectors with cloud services.

We haven't had a situation where we need to scale this solution.

We haven't had any major issue with the solution so we haven't called Microsoft technical support for Azure AD so far.

We have always used Active Directory as our dedicated services solution. Three years ago we increased the scope of it and synchronized it with Azure Active Directory. Our on-premises Active Directory is our primary solution. Azure Active Directory is an extension of that.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. It didn't take too long just to get our Azure Active Directory environment set up and running. I think it took less than a day. It was really fast.

We already had Active Directory on-premises, so what we created was the instance of Azure Active Directory. All the different groups, users, and services were already set up. We then replicated with what we currently have in the Azure Active Directory instance. It was not really difficult.

Our company is quite small and that is reflected in our IT department. Azure Active Directory is handled by our infrastructure coordination team, which has only two members. One is the senior engineer who performs all the major changes and the main configurations. We also have a junior engineer who runs all the operations in the company. From time to time, one person from our help desk, usually me, does some small operations when we don't have the infrastructure team available.

We use a reseller to buy the product and they also provide some consulting services. Our relationship with Microsoft is not a direct relationship.

Our reseller is SoftwareONE. They're a global company and our experience with them has been good. We have been with them since 2010 or 2011. We have two or three different services from them related to Microsoft and other brands. They are not exclusively reselling Microsoft licenses. 

From a very subjective point of view, as I haven't drawn any kind of numbers to calculate the return on investment, what I can see so far is that the investment is running smoothly and it's easier for us to run our environment with it.

If you have all your infrastructure built using Microsoft tools, it is straightforward to go with Azure Active Directory. Under these circumstances, I don't see any reason to find another solution.

We have an E3 contract, and I believe Azure AD is included in it.

We didn't evaluate other vendors because our entire environment is based on Microsoft solutions.

As with any implementation, design is key. That would be applicable to Active Directory as well, but when it comes to Azure AD, do not start the installation unless you have an accepted design for it. You shouldn't just start creating objects on it. You need to have a clear strategy behind what you're going to do. That will save you a lot of headaches. If you start without any kind of design, at the end of the road, you can end up saying, "Okay, I think it would have been better to create this organizational unit," or, "We should have enabled this feature." It's probably not very straightforward to implement the changes. So have a team design the Azure Active Directory structure for you. You need to have the map before starting the implementation.

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.

Our use case depends on the client, their project, and what they want to deploy. 

1. The solution can be deployed for security purposes. Multi-factor authentication is being deployed as a second layer of authentication, especially during this COVID-19 time, because everything has to stay secure. 
2. Almost every organization uses the software as a service (SaaS) part. Because of the pandemic right now, a lot of companies are moving many things to the cloud, like virtual machines (VMs) and virtual networks. It doesn't invalidate the fact that some companies don't want to have control on-premises. 

Everything depends on the solution or what the client wants.

We use it for PaaS and IaaS.

In terms of identity management, it helps to improve security posture. It generally helps in terms cloud security, simplicity, and single sign-on for multiple apps.

In terms of improvement, there should be more flexibility and conditional access. There is a lot of flexibility already, but there are some technologies that should be embedded and integrated into it for a more flexible, customized experience. Also, there should be more tools for analysis for clients, e.g., there should be more flexibility aimed at end users. Regular IT guys for each company should be able to use the tools to troubleshoot a certain level of analysis in their environment.

The security part should be improved overall. 

The visibility in the GUI is not good for management. There are a lot of improvements that could make it better. It should be more user-friendly overall. It is not user-friendly because everything keeps changing on the platform. I can understand it because I know the platform,  am familiar with it, and use it every day. However, for a lot of clients, they don't use it every day or are not familiar with it, so it should be more user friendly.

I have been using it for four to five years.

Availability for Azure AD as a whole is 99.95 percent. It is simpler and more available than the way technology used to be previously.

It is very scalable. When you talk about licensing, you have the option to scale up or scale down. For example, you purchase 50 seats of licenses and assign 45 licenses, then for some reason, you fire 10 employees. Once you fire them, you will probably block their identity access and single sign-in. After that, you can decide to reduce the number of licenses. On the other hand, if you acquire 10 licenses and employ five new people, then you can scale up by adding more five licenses that month. So, it helps you to scale up or scale down easily.

In another example, if you have acquired five virtual machine instances, then are using more in terms of the processor, you can scale up. It depends on the configuration you have. If you have done the setup and everything from the beginning, then you can say, "If the processor level reaches 80 percent, you want to add another two virtual machine instances." On the other hand, if you deployed five virtual machine instances, but your usage of those processors is lower than 30 percent, then you should scale down. So, if you have five licenses and you want to scale down by one, then you can scale it down so you can reduce your costs.

I would rate the technical support as a nine out of 10.

When I set it up two years ago, it was easy, not complex. It didn't take much time at all to set up.

A lot of people sign in or set it up with a Google account, Yahoo account, or Microsoft account, which is not the global administrator. A lot of people think that this is the global administrator. They don't understand that the account might have an extension and don't see this until that account gets locked out. That is when they have problems signing in. The setup is not that complex. It is just that the user experience overall needs improvement here.

The deployment process depends on what you are trying to achieve and the technology that you are trying to deploy, e.g., are you trying to deploy SSO, set up device writeback, or do a regular AD Connect setup? Everything depends on the objective or the overall goals of what you want to achieve.

Even after it has been deployed, one or two users may have problems with their account in terms of multi-factor authentication or the way it has been set up. I work with them to troubleshoot these issues.

Sometimes, the priority is to set up AD Connect, which integrates your on-premises to Active Directory. You must make sure your server is up and running. Apart from that, you need to set up your tenant, which is your profile admin center. 

If they want to download and install their tools, then we can connect to their on-premises for synchronization. So, it helps collect on-premises data and put it into the cloud. 

You can also install PowerShell. 

Everything needs to be considered for the requirements and if it is within the budget, then you can come up with a solution, whether it is SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS. 

Since people might not be very familiar with the platform, I have developed a system for how to use, deploy, or utilize the technology.

At the end of the day, it is about the overall goal because everything comes with a cost. Azure AD comes in different ways and shapes, e.g., SaaS is different from IaaS or PaaS, though it is still the same platform. 

Whether you are a small business or large business, you can always enjoy a very secure cloud platform. 

I would rate Azure AD as a nine out of 10.

It has allowed us to use other SaaS products that will authenticate with Office 365 as well as other Microsoft products and non-Microsoft products, so we can have a single sign-on experience for our users. Rather than them needing to have multiple usernames and passwords, they just use whatever they have as their main username and password to log onto their machine.

It is SaaS based, but we sync up from our on-prem into Azure AD.

With COVID-19 at the moment, this solution is a good example of where we needed to move a lot of our traffic from our on-prem authentication into the cloud. Last year, before I joined the company, we had to setup our VPN differently. It was easy enough for us to do because our machines were already joined to Azure AD. We just split the traffic and stopped having to rely on our on-prem VPN for our Office 365 traffic. We were just good to go into the Internet because we had all the features setup, e.g., MFA and Conditional Access, which made life a lot easier.

It has made our security posture better. There are always improvements to be made, but we feel more secure because of the way that things have been setup and how everything integrates together.

• Single sign-on is the most useful at the onset. 
• The dashboards offered are very granular, in terms of usages. 
• We find the Conditional Access element and Multi-Factor Authentication side of things very useful. 

These features let us have secure, yet user-friendly interactions, rather than having to be embroiled in various types of signups for each application. These allow us to be a lot more granular as well as making sure our environment is more secure. Our accesses and users remain secure too.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and Conditional Access have helped us be more secure. There is one place where all these features are posted, making life a lot easier. If we were to try and buy these separately, then it would be a painful experience. Whereas, if it is in one product, then all these features talk to each other and it is available for us in one go. For example, when you buy a car, if you buy the steering wheel and engine separately, then you need to make it work altogether. Whereas, you just want to buy a car with everything included, making life a lot easier.

It has made the end user experience a lot better. They only have one password to get into their online applications and that makes the user experience much better.

The one area that we are working on at the moment is the business-to-consumer (B2C) element. It is not as rich as some of the other competitors out there. The B2C element of Azure AD is quite niche. Some of the features that they offer, e.g., customized emails, are not available with B2C. You are stuck with whatever email template they give you, and it is not the best user experience. For B2C, that is a bit of a negative thing.

In my previous role, there would have been a few things that I would have liked added, but they have already introduced them. Those are already in the roadmap. 

I have been using the product for many years. I have only been at Adecco for six months, but I had experience with it at my prior role as well. Overall, I have used it in excess of five years.

The stability is fantastic. It is a big step from using Active Directory on-premise to now moving to something that has been completely rethought in the cloud. It is very impressive and fits into the whole Microsoft ecosystem, making life easier.

We have had some downtime, but I think a lot of that has been unavoidable from Microsoft's side of things. Microsoft made some changes in some instances which caused certain features to be unavailable, like Azure AD became unavailable a few weeks ago. I love that they were very frank, open, and honest as to what happened. However, the bottom line is that we prefer downtime not to happen. 

We have had no problems with it. We are not exactly the biggest organization, i.e., 30,000 accounts. IT makes up probably 5,000 of those accounts, or less. If we were an organization of hundreds of thousands, then we might be questioning scalability. However, I have never known it not to be scalable. For medium- to large-organizations, it is fine. I think it is when you get into multiple companies with multiple complexities then it becomes a struggle. For us, it is more than scalable for our purposes.

We still have many applications that need to be onboarded to Azure AD. Because we are moving to the cloud, there is a lot more that we need onboarded into Azure AD, but it is working well so far.

The technical support is great. We have a dedicated resource who understands our environment. We have regular meetings with them once a week where we get to discuss the current status of various tickets as well as our questions. The support that we get is very good.

We have Premier Support. We also have Premier Mission Critical Support on Azure AD, which is where we have someone who is dedicated to our setup and knows how our environment's setup. Therefore, if we do have a major issue, then they would be brought in to help resolve those issues.

It was a given that we would use Microsoft. To use Microsoft 365, you need to use Azure AD, so that is what we did.

I have always used AD and Azure AD.

In my previous role, the initial setup was quite simple. It was a simple case of install and follow some wizards, then you pretty much had it setup and synced to your Azure AD from the on-prem. Minimum effort was required.

The deployment was about three weeks, which was mainly the change process and getting it through our internal changes. It was quite quick. 

We did it ourselves internally with some help from Microsoft. There were four people involved in the deployment: the service owner, a Microsoft product engineer, and two internal engineers.

We have the maintenance outsourced to a partner. However, we have had trouble with this partner because of their lack of delivery.

Ideally, I would like around five people to work with the partner and maintain the environment. At the moment, we have one person and are recruiting two others. For our scale, three to five people would be great as well as working with a partner to do the operations. That is the model that I am using.

It is one of those costs where you can't really quantify a return on investment. In the grand scheme of things, if we didn't have it, we would probably have a lot more breaches. It would be a lot harder to detect issues because we would have people using static usernames and passwords for various sites, making us open to a lot more attacks. The amount of security and benefit that we get out of it is not quantifiable but the return of investment from a qualitative point of view is much higher than not having it. 

It is the one platform that should be used for all authentication. Azure AD allows you to have one username and password to access all of your sites, which makes life a lot easier. Therefore, the return on investment is good because people have to use the one ID and password.

Be sure:

1. You know your userbase, e.g., how many users you have. 
2. You choose the right license and model that suit your business requirements.

In the future, I would maybe like better integration with competitive products. Obviously, Microsoft would be selective on that anyway. For example, working alongside Okta as a competitor, their product seems to be a bit richer in its offerings. From what I have seen, Okta has a bit more of an edge, which is something that might benefit Azure AD.

Be prepared to learn. It is a massive area. There are a lot of features offered by Azure AD. It works well within the Microsoft realm but also it can work very well with non-Microsoft realms, integrating with other parties. The fact it is Microsoft makes life so much easier, because everyone integrates with Microsoft. Just be prepared to absorb because it is a big beast. It is also a necessary evil that you need to have it. The advantages outweigh the disadvantages of having it.

The learning curve is both steep and wide. You can only focus on what you can focus on with the resources you have in your organization. It is such a big product and changing all the time. This means that you need dedicated people to be on it. There is a lot of keeping up with what Microsoft puts out there with Azure AD, which is great. This makes its feature-rich, but you need to be able to learn how it integrates into your business as well.

What Azure AD does for my current organization is sufficient, but we are probably not adopting most of what Azure AD has. We do not have it at a mature place at the moment, but we hope (over the next couple of years) to get it up to the latest and greatest.

It is an integral part of using Microsoft stuff, so we are not going to move away from it any time soon. If anything, we will ensure that everything is on Azure AD and authenticating users use Azure AD. That part will still take some time to do. Like most large organizations who have been around for a long time, we have legacy to deal with and some of that legacy does not support Azure AD. So, we are working towards that.

If you come from a company with legacy technology, then there will be a lot of business and technological changes for you to make.

The adoption of Azure AD B2C is progressing somewhat well. That is something that we just started in the last couple of months. We are having more of our products being onboarded into it. We will be moving other implementations of Azure AD into the one Azure AD implementation, and it has been great so far.

I would rate it as a nine out of 10. I would have given it a 10, but it is impossible for something to be perfect. The product does itself a disservice when there is an impact due to downtime, which we have had over the years. Because you rely on it so heavily, you can't afford for it to go down for a few minutes because then there will be user impact. 

We are using Azure Active Directory (AD) for:

• Application authentication, which is single sign-on. 
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA). 
• Conditional access for people coming in from non-trusted networks, which are interlinked. 
• Azure AD B2B. 

These are the four big items that we are using.

The flexibility around accessing company systems from anywhere at any time has proven to be very helpful. Organizations decided during the COVID-19 pandemic, on a very short notice, to announce that everyone should be working from home. The good part was that our company was already working under Azure Active Directory, and most of our applications were under Azure at that time. For us, it was a very seamless transition. There were no major impacts on the migration nor did we have to do any special setups or need to configure networks. So, it was a very seamless experience for our users, who used to come into our office, to access systems. They started working from home and there was no difference for them. We did not have to do anything special to support that transition from working from the office to working from home. It was seamless. There was no impact to the end users.

Bringing our many hundreds of applications onto Azure Active Directory single sign-on authentication has had a big impact on users' productivity, usage, and adoption of enterprise applications because they don't need to log in. It is the same credentials and token being used for days and months when people use our systems with hundreds of applications being integrated. From a user perspective, it is quite a seamless experience. They don't need to remember their username, passwords, and other credential information because you are maintaining a single sign-on token. So, it is a big productivity enhancement. Before, we were not using a single sign-on for anything. Now, almost 90 to 95 percent of applications are on Azure Active Directory single sign-on.

The single sign-on is an amazing product. Its integration with the back-end, like MFA and conditional access, is very helpful for enterprise class companies because of changing dynamics as well as how companies and workers interact. Traditionally, companies used to have their own premises, networks, network-level VPN and proxy settings, and networks to access company systems. Now, anyone can work from anywhere within our company. We are a global company who works across more than 60 countries, so it is not always possible to have secure networks. So, we need to secure our applications and data without having a network parameter-level security. 

Azure Active Directory provides us with identity-based authentication, which secures access at the user level and also integrates with conditional access policies and multi-factor authentication helping to increase the identity security for that person. So, the hacking and leaking of passwords is a secondary problem because you will not authenticate a person with one factor. There is a second factor of authentication available to increase the security premise for your company.

The analytics are very helpful. They give you very fine grain data around patterns of usage, such as, who is using it, sign-in attempts, or any failed logins. It also provides detailed analytics, like the amount of users who are using which applications. The application security features let you drill-down reports and generate reports based on the analytics produced via your Active Directory, which is very helpful. This can feed into security operation centers and other things.

One of the areas where Microsoft is very actively working on enhancing is the capabilities around the B2B and B2C areas.

Microsoft is actively pursuing and building new capabilities around identity governance.

There is a concept of cross-tenant trust relationships, which I believe Microsoft is actively pursuing. That is something which in the coming days and years to come by will be very key to the success of Azure Active Directory, because many organizations are going into mergers and acquisitions or spinning off new companies. They will still have to access the old tenant information because of multiple legal reasons, compliance reasons, and all those things. So, there should be some level of tenant-level trust functionality, where you can bring people from other tenants to access some part of your tenant application. So, that is an area which is growing. I believe Microsoft is actively pursuing this, and it will be an interesting piece.

I have been using it for three and a half years.

We have worked very closely with Microsoft over the past few years. We were one of the early adopters as an enterprise. We worked very closely with Microsoft to develop many products and features.

Looking at our journey over the last three and a half years, there were a few stability incidents, which is understandable from any technology platform provider perspective. However, it was overall a very good experience with a stable platform. There were two or three major incidents in the last three years.

There are about eight people who handle the day-to-day maintenance. These people focus on single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and Azure B2B.

The scalability is amazing. Microsoft gets billions of logins every day. They are scaling it every day. They announced an increase in the availability that the SLA guarantees from 99.9 to 99.99 percent from April of this year. Overall, it is very stable and scalable. These are things that we don't need to worry about.

It is fully rolled out to everyone in our organization.

Overall, the technical support is very good. Overall, if you follow the customer support route and raise an incident ticket, then they are very prompt. They work very closely and collaboratively with us. We have a dedicated technical account manager (TAM). We have governance in place. We engage with them bi-weekly. So, we have a pretty good working structure with them.

Identity within Microsoft is a separate division, and we work very closely with them.

We didn't use another solution before Azure AD.

The initial setup was straightforward.

How you plan the tenant and set it up is quite key. There are major components that you need to be aware of: 

• Are you planning to implement multi-factor authentication at the tenant level? 
• What type of conditional access policies do you want to implement? 
• What type of access governance do you want to put in? 
• What type of role catalogue do you want to maintain? 
• What type of structure of the AD organization you want to maintain? 
• What type of device registrations do you want? 

There are some prerequisite checklists available from Microsoft. However, these are quite fundamental decisions. If you don't take the lead on them, these decisions will impact you, then you have to go back and fix them later on. So, plan ahead. 

Initial deployment took us a few months across our organization, but we decided to use most of the elements at a very early stage. So, our use case could be different than other companies. Some organizations that I know have chosen not to deploy multi-factor authentication nor do self-service password reset to deployment, then the user community is impacted with that. It can differ organization to organization based on the scale, number of users, locations, etc. So, there are many factors involved. 

We phased out our deployment over a couple of years, focusing on single sign-on and multi-factor authentication, then self-service password reset and other components. So, we did it as a phased deployment with a small team of four or five people.

I strongly recommend the Microsoft GTP Teams, which are with their R&D division. They have a go into production, dedicated team who work with customers from an end-to-end lifecycle perspective. So, they will help you to build the tenant from scratch, following the right standards and guidelines. For us, it was straightforward, but we started this journey in 2017/2018. It is quite a mature product now.

We work with most managed service providers, like Infosys, TCS, Wipro, etc. We have had good experiences with them. Initially, we worked with Infosys.

We are closing all data centers. Therefore, to build or enhance any existing capability in applications, it could have been very a costly effort for us. Rather than building an authentication platform, we are using a standard-based approach where we just need to plug and play. Instead of going in and reinventing the wheel for every application, we are using a standard out-of-the-box service offering from Azure Active Directory, where we just consume that service, then users have a seamless experience.

Having a single supplier saves you loads of headaches from:

• Multiple suppliers and multiple technologies
• Integrating everything.
• Doing upgrades.
• Maintenance.
• In-house deployment
• Having multiple components of those solutions to work together.
• Managing multiple vendors, supplier support teams, contracts, renewals, and licenses. 

If you are dealing with one supplier with an out-of-the-box solution, which provides you end-to-end capabilities, then it is naturally cheaper and less of a headache to manage and operate.

This solution was the natural choice. There is no vendor nor supplier providing this type of capability right now in the market, especially considering people in organizations are using Office 365. So, it is the natural choice to not to go with a third-party supplier, then try to integrate those third-party solutions and technologies into Microsoft. It is one box and the same Office 365 tenant in the same environment where you operate all your settings. Therefore, it is a very natural, out-of-the-box solution.

Look at the market. However, look at it from an end-to-end perspective, especially focused on your applications and how a solution will integrate with your overall security landscape. This is key. Azure Active Directory provides this capability, integrating with your Office 365 tenant, data security elements, classifications, identity protection, device registrations, and Windows operating system. Everything comes end-to-end integrated. While there is no harm evaluating different tools, Azure AD is an out-of-the-box solution from Microsoft, which is very helpful.

Every day we are increasing the number of users and onboarding new applications. Also, we are growing the B2B feature. We try to use any new feature or enhancement coming in from Microsoft, working very closely with them. It is an ongoing journey.

Dealing with a single supplier is easier rather than dealing with five suppliers. Historically, if you have to do anything like that, then you will end up dealing with at least 10 different vendors and 10 different technologies. It is always interesting and challenging to manage different roadmaps, strategies, upgrade parts, licensing, and contracts. The biggest lesson learnt is wherever you can go with native-cloud tools and technologies, then go for it.

I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10.

I use it for managing identities, access, and security in a centralized way. I help other people use this product.

Using Azure AD has improved our security posture overall, more than anything I've ever worked with.

It enables end-users to be more secure without it actually affecting their work. Usually, security solutions makes it harder for them, so many start using other solutions instead, solutions that are not managed or monitored by the organization. But when we use Azure AD's Conditional Access, for example, as long as they behave, users don't even notice it.

The passwordless feature means they don't even need to have a password anymore. It's easier for users to be more secure. You can invite anyone to collaborate in a secure way. 

Passwordless sign-in, which is one of the new features where you no longer need to have a password, is one of the great features. Passwords have always been hard for end-users, but not so hard to bypass for bad guys. It often doesn't matter how complex or long your password is. If a bad guy can trick you into giving it to him or can sniff your keyboard or your network, or access it through malware, your password doesn't matter anyway. So all the complexity, length of the password, and having to regularly change it is hard for users, but it doesn't stop hackers. And that's what makes passwordless so valuable.

Multi-factor authentication is good as it allows you to answer a notification or even an SMS or a phone call, but that has become more unsecure now because the bad guys are learning new way to bypass these methods. But using passwordless technology, you're not even using a password anymore. You're basically just signing a logon request without actually sending, typing or storing the password. This is awesome for any user, regardless of whether you're a factory worker or a CFO. It's secure and super-simple.

It also stops phishing, which is amazing. If someone tricks a user into going into the "Macrosoft" store or some other site that looks like the real site, they can trick the user into signing in there and then they can steal the password. But if the user is using passwordless, the passwordless solution would say, "Sorry, I don't have a relationship here. I can't sign in." In that way, it can stopping phishing, which is one of the most common attack vectors right now.

Another feature that has improved our security posture is Conditional Access where we can not only say "yes" or "no" to a sign-in, but we can also have conditions. We can say, "Sure, you can sign in, but you need to be part of the right group. You need to come from a managed client. You can't come in with a risky sign-in. You need to come in from a certain platform or a certain network." You can have a really complex set of rules and if those rules are not fulfilled you will not be able to sign in, or we can require MFA or even control the session. That is also a really good security feature.

The B2B feature is another good one where, if I want to give someone access to my my apps or data, instead of creating an account and a password and giving that info to the user, I can invite that user so he or she can use their own existing account. That way, I don't need to manage password resets and the like. The B2B feature enables collaborating with anyone, anytime, anywhere.

The Azure AD Application Proxy, which helps you publish applications in a secure way, is really good, but has room for improvement. We are moving from another solution into the Application Proxy and the other one has features that the App Proxy doesn't have. An example is where the the role you're signing in as will send you to different URLs, a feature that App Proxy doesn't have (yet).

With Azure AD, if you look in detail on any of the features, you will see 20 good things but it can be missing one thing. All over the place there are small features that could be improved, but these improvement is coming out all the time. It's not like, "Oh, it's been a year since new features came out." Features are coming out all the time and I've even contacted Microsoft and requested some changes and they've been implemented as well.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for close to eight years now.

The stability or availability is incredible. It's super-good. However, just the other week, there was an outage for a few hours, so it's not 100 percent. But in Microsoft's defense, that hasn't happened for a long time.

What I also usually point out to people is that if you host your own solution and things break in the middle of the night, who's going to look at it? With this solution, you know that in the first millisecond that something breaks, 10 people or 100 people are looking at it. You get constant feedback about what's going on and you usually get a full report afterwards about what actually happened and how they will prevent them in the future. They are really good at managing these outages.

I don't know what the uptime is, but it's still 99.999 or something like that. It's super-trustworthy, but it's not 100 percent. What is? Still, it's likely much better than a private on-premises solution could ever be.

In terms of scalability there are no limits. I have customers with 10 people and others with up to 300,000, and everything in between. There is no difference. I haven't had to think about memory or disk space or CPU in a long time because everything just works. It's super-scalable.

We have 100 customers and all of them use Azure AD. They are spread all over the world. In Sweden, where I'm from, we have government municipalities, we have private corporations, hospitals, manufacturing. Everybody needs this. It doesn't matter which market or which area you work in. I don't see a target audience for this. It's everyone.

Their tech support is pretty good, depending on who you end up talking to. If you open a support request, you can be asked quite basic questions at first: "Have you tried turning it on and off again?" Sometimes we need to go through five people to get the correct people, the people who know the problem area really well. We usually dig really deep into the area and learn al lot first. We need someone who is expert in this product and who knows exactly how that area of the product works. Sometimes it takes a while to get to the correct person, but once you get there, they're usually super-knowledgeable, super-friendly and quick to reply. It can be tricky to find the right person. But I suppose that is the same in any company. 

Over the years, we have built up a contact network so we can usually contact the right people right away, as we are a Microsoft partner. But because this review is for everyone, I would suggest that you keep asking until you'll end up at the right people.

Overall, Microsoft is really attentive. Previously, you could say, "Can you show me the roadmap for the next three years?" and they would say "Sure." They don't really do that anymore because they say, "It now depends on what you want." We can help influence Microsoft how to prioritize. They have daily and weekly meetings where they discuss "What do people want now? How should we prioritize?" It's a totally new Microsoft compared with a few years ago. If I see something missing, they usually come up with it pretty quickly.

I see people moving from other solutions into Azure AD because they're not satisfied with the other solutions. 

The initial setup is a straightforward process, for such a complex technology. Although there are a lot of moving parts involved in actually setting it up, it is quite easy.

I've set this up for many and, in general, it takes less than a day to get things up and running. Then, of course, there's tons of optional configuration to improve and secure things, but just getting it up and running takes less than a day.

The implementation strategy used to be helping them get to the cloud, by doing things like making sure that they clean up the accounts in the on-premises solution and setting up the synchronization rules. But nowadays, most of my customers are people who have Azure AD in place already. So now I'm trying to enable and configure and improve security configuration. For example, you don't have to set up the passwordless feature and you don't have to do multi-factor authentication. They are optional. So my task now is more one of improving their configuration and turning on security features. A lot of it is secure by default, but some features require you to configure and set them up.

With the licensing there are so many features involved, and different features for different licensing levels. Those levels include the free version, as well as Premium P1, Premium P2. My approach with my clients is usually, "What kind of licenses do you have? Okay, let's improve this, because you have it already. You're paying for it already. Why not use it?" 

The next step is, "These features are included in the licensing you don't have. Do you think it's worth it?" I talk to them, I explain them, and I demonstrate them. They will usually say, "Yeah, we need that one."

I don't know other solutions really deeply. I know of them, but I'm a specialist who is focused on this one. But I realize, when I talked to other specialists in other areas, that they are solving the same problem, so they usually have similar solutions.

What Microsoft is winning on is that people used to say, "Buy the best product, the best in class or best in breed for each area." But that has changed now. "Buy the best ecosystem" is the better approach. If I have Azure AD as my identity and access solution, and if I also use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and the Defender for Office 365, and other Microsoft solutions, I can then go to one portal, one place, and see how my apps are doing, how my users are doing, how my devices are doing, and how my data is doing. You get this super-integrated ecosystem where everything talks to each other. That is the strength.

In my opinion Azure AD is a fantasic standalone product, but you have so much more benefit from using it together with other Microsoft solutions.

The user usually doesn't care if we use Microsoft or any other vendor's to protect his identity or his computer or his data. They just want to do their jobs. But as admin, I see the advantage of using the same provider. I can actually create a query saying, "Show me all users who logged in to Azure AD from a device with this operating system, accessing this application, and who have a risk on their device, where a document is classified as sensitive." I can do all of that in one query for identity application devices and the data. That's the strength, having that insight into everything. And when it comes to security and Azure AD, Microsoft has 3,000 full-time security researchers, and they spend over a billion dollars each year on security research alone.

What's amazing is that the CIA, the FBI, and these big companies or organizations are using Azure AD, and they have really high requirements for audits and protection. As a "regular" organization, you can get the same level of security without have to ask for it. You get to ride on the coattails of that amazing security without spending $1 billion yourself.

If another Microsoft customer is hit by something bad, Microsoft is going to stop it for the rest of its customers. If you're the first to get hit by new bad malware, that may be tough, but all of the other customers are instantly protected because different customers share threat intelligence, in a way. You get the benefit of all the security discoveries that Microsoft makes, instantly.

Talk to someone who knows a lot about it. Sure, you can look at everything on the docs.microsoft.com page, but it can be hard to understand what each feature is and the value it give you. Talk to someone who knows both licensing and technology, to understand what's there and what you should pay for and what you should not pay for.

There are also a lot of good videos out there, like sessions from Microsoft Ignite. You also have the Microsoft Mechanics video series on YouTube with a lot of videos. So if you like to learn through video, there's a lot available for you. You can also go to docs of Microsoft.com and search for Azure AD. You will get like a starting page where you can learn the identity and access basics or also how you integrate apps. There is a link collection with everything and anything you would like to know. Or you can call me.

We are Security advisors. We help people, we train people, we implement it for them, we document it, we teach them, and we talk at seminars. We sell our knowledge. We don't sell solutions. There are 25 people in our company and five to 10 people are working with Azure AD. It's not that we need five for our daily operations, it's just that's how many of us are working with it. In general, a company might need one to five people working on it. If I need to set up a feature for five people or 500,000 people I do the same steps. The thing that is different in bigger companies, is that you need to communicate, you need to educate, you need to write Knowledge Base articles, you need to inform the service desk. All of those things are just to prepare users. But that has nothing to do with Azure AD. The technology is super-simple. It's more that the process around it is different in different companies.