Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

I am a cloud engineer, and I do a lot of administrative work that involves creating new infrastructure for our applications. Whenever I create infrastructure, I have to install it on our Active Directory and then set it up. This is how it was that I started working with Azure Active Directory.

Once the infrastructure is set up, I usually proceed to create user groups and user IDs inside Active Directory. After they are created, I set up and configure them based on the requirements of the organization, including the access required for different groups and users.

We deal with a lot of health information that we have to keep confidential, so having the Azure cloud security policies in place, such that nothing is exposed to the outside world, is helpful for us.

The security and infrastructure management features are the most valuable ones for us.

It offers multifactor authentication for setting up development pipelines.

Better deployment management and visibility functionality would be helpful. There is a lot of room for improvement in our infrastructure, and in particular, when we create something, we have to visit a lot of websites. This makes life more difficult for us.

When we deploy new infrastructure, it begins with a lengthy approval process. For example, as an administrator, I may receive an infrastructure request from one of our developers. The developer might need access to our front-end, where all of the servers are deployed. The problem is that we don't know exactly what has been deployed within our servers, so better visibility would be helpful.

It's a closed infrastructure, and every developer gets an individualized container. We don't know exactly which features have been provided to them and it's a roundabout process to log back into Active Directory and see exactly what permissions have been assigned. It requires returning to a specific feature and looking at the specific user.

I have been working with Azure Active Directory for just over three and a half years.

This is a highly reliable solution and we plan to continue using it.

Right now, we have 5,000 users that are deployed on Azure Active Directory. Every internal user account that's been created has some sort of multifactor authentication attached to it.

Right now, there isn't a plan to increase our usage. I think we have reached our maximum capacity and if we have to add on something else, then we have to use another tenant or figure out a different way to do it.

We have a team of 15 people who deal with tickets related to this solution.

We constantly have the chance to engage with Microsoft regarding Azure Active Directory. They provide full-time support, so for any issues that we face, we just create a ticket. When we have issues, we quickly get someone from the Azure support team to help us out.

Prior to using Azure Active Directory, we had our own Active Directory. Once we started migrating our applications to Azure, we began moving away from our traditional implementation.

The initial deployment process takes a couple of days for us, although exactly how long depends upon the type of deployment. If you have new deployments then I suggest creating an automated script that will kick it off because this will save time. If on the other hand, there is something that is already deployed and it needs to be redeployed, it doesn't take longer than a couple of hours.

It only takes one person to deploy. It is done on a ticket basis, as requested by people like our developers.

This product provides added value to the company.

In summary, this is a good product and it has been helpful for us, but without doing the proper research, I wouldn't recommend starting with Azure Active Directory. Migrating all of your user accounts and then your resources from different domains to an Azure Active Directory is a huge task. It means that you have set up to create everything from scratch, so without doing proper research, you may run into problems.

I would rate this solution an eight 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.

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.

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.

It underpins our application authentication and security requirements for internal users.

During the pandemic, it helped us carry on working securely as a business.

Azure Active Directory hugely improved our organization’s security posture. The ability to control access to resources has vastly improved.

We very much like Conditional Access. We also like the risky sign-ins and Identity Protection. These features provide us the security that lets us fulfill our security requirements as a company.

Azure Active Directory features have helped improve our security posture. The remote working has been a massive help during the pandemic.

The solution has made our end user experience a lot easier and smoother.

On-premise capabilities for information and identity management need improvement but I know these are in pipeline.

I have been using it for five or six years.

The stability has improved over the last two to three years.

It has fantastic scalability. Globally, we have about 80,000 users. 

In each territory there are on average around 40 people managing the solution on the admin side. We also have SMEs for the harder tasks. Then you have people, like me, who are architects and determine approach and create designs.

Microsoft Premier Support is very good. We make good use of it. 

The free support is okay.

For mobile device management we used to have MobileIron and Blackberry. Those products have been removed in favour of Intune and Azure AD features. Other legacy security services will be removed in preference for the Azure equivalents. Strategically, Azure AD makes more sense for us. Cloud first is the strategic direction within my company.

It is a predeployed solution, creating the links between the on-premise system and SaaS system is moderately easy.

Our deployment took a month.

For a non-complex organization, the deployment process would be a lot easier than it is for a complex organization. There are a lot of business processes that need to be determined as well as a lot of conversations. The technology side of things is the easy bit. It is the design that takes awhile.

It was all done internally and using Microsoft Partners

We have only really bought into the solution over the last 12 months or so. We expect to see cost returns in the next 12 months.

If you get rid of all the products providing features that Azure suite can provide, then it makes sense cost-wise.

Microsoft Premier Support is an additional cost to the standard licensing fees.

Azure Active Directory and its feature set under a single vendor are unique in our market.

Compared to how it was five years ago, the solution is has really matured.

Make sure that business requirements are understood upfront and a design is in place before any services are deployed. Ensure the people deploying it understand the capabilities and implications of choices.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10.

We use it mainly for our Office 365 files. The integration between the two is interesting. It's been a learning curve.

Overall, it's not a very intuitive solution.

When you have an Office 365 enterprise subscription, it comes with Azure Active Directory. We don't have a subscription to Active Directory, but our Active Directory connector puts our credentials into the Azure Active Directory. On the Office 365 side, we're also in the GCC high 365, so it's a lot more locked down. There are a few things that aren't implemented which make things frustrating. I don't blame the product necessarily, but there are links and things within there that still point back to the .com-side and not the .us-side.

There's a security portal and a compliance portal. They're being maintained, but one's being phased in and the others are being phased out. Things continue to change. I guess that's good, but it's just been a bit of a learning curve.

Our Office 365 subscriptions are tied to our on-prem domain — I have a domain admin there. With our Active Directory connector, our on-prem credentials are being pushed to the cloud. We also have domain credentials in the cloud, but there's no Office subscription tied to it, just to do the administration stuff. I moved my sync credential to have a lot more administrative privileges. Some of the documentation I was reading clearly showed that when you have this particular ability right on the Azure side, and then you have another ability on the Office side, that intuitively, the Microsoft cloud knows to give you certain rights to be able to do stuff. They're just kind of hidden in different places.

Some things are in Exchange, and some things are in the Intune section. We had a few extra light subscriptions that weren't being used, so I gave my microsoft.us admin account a whole other subscription. In the big scheme of things, it's roughly $500 a year additionally — it just seems like a lot. I didn't create a mailbox for that and I was trying to do something in Exchange online and it said I couldn't do it because I didn't have a mailbox.

You can expect a different user experience between on-prem and online. Through this cloud period, we have premiere services, we have a premiere agreement and we had an excellent engineer help us with an exchange upgrade where we needed a server. We needed an OS upgrade and we needed the exchange upgrade on the on-prem hybrid server. We asked this engineer for assistance because my CIO wanted to get rid of the on-prem exchange hybrid server, but everything that I was reading was saying that you needed to keep it as long as you had anything on-prem. We asked the engineer about it and he said, "Yeah, you want to keep that." In his opinion, it was at least going to be two years. So at least I got my CIO to stop talking about that. It's just been an interesting time in this transition between on-prem and in the cloud.

In a secure environment, a lot of this stuff is PowerShell, which is fine. It's a learning curve, but if you don't use it all time, then it's a lot of back and forth with looking at the documentation and looking at other blogs. If you're in a secure environment, the Windows RM (remote management) stuff can be blocked, and that's frustrating, too.

I have been using this solution for roughly five months.

It's definitely both stable and scalable. I used to work in an environment where we had a couple of onsite engineers from Microsoft and I worked on Active Directory — I did that for four years. We did the Active Directory health check, so I actually worked with the engineer for a week and went through our Active Directory. At the time, Microsoft said it was one of the top five most complicated forests out there. We had 150,000 users and 18 domains across the globe supporting the military, so it was pretty big. 

We have experience with their premier support. We have a live audit coming up shortly so we don't have a lot of time to waste, waiting for support to get back to us — unless it's very critical. 

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, so I cannot comment on that. 

We used an integrator, however, we don't speak of his name anymore. 

I think we're on the E3 — I think it was about 35 dollars per user. We may go up to the E5, which includes Project Online and the telecom service in TEAMS. We're in the process of rolling out Office 365 internally. We've had really great feedback that people really like TEAMS and we want to move there. 

We had a roadmap meeting with Microsoft a few months ago. Some of the more accessible types of things were on the roadmap for the first quarter of this year. I know that Microsoft's working hard at listening to their customers, especially through COVID. Collaboration has changed. They also have military folks, that's why they created the GCC High. Once they got into the GCC high, they're like, "Oh, we need to collaborate a little bit more." So they've been pushing a little bit more on integration. We're not going to have that kind of clout where I am, but where I used to work, we would've. 

Overall, I would give Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium a rating of four out of ten. They could really benefit from some better user-training. 

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

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

The scalability of the solution is good.

Technical support can be helpful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lot of our clients basically want to go to the cloud and they don't know how to proceed with doing so. The first thing we recommended is to make sure their identity is in Azure AD as a hybrid approach. We're not getting rid of their on-premises environment, and instead basically, if they're planning to go to Office 365,  they will be able to take advantage of the Azure Active Directory.

Especially nowadays, people are working from home and we have a client that we actually started migrating to Azure Active Directory and moving some of their applications into the cloud. Since COVID struck, and a lot of people are working from home, since the data center's on-premises, it is very hard for them to bring all of their users into VPN and some of them there are outdated and they can't really accommodate the number of users that are working from home.

However, with Azure AD, some of their applications we have in there they can access from anywhere - even from their home basically, as long as they have internet access. Some of the applications we brought into Azure AD include the Windows Virtual Desktop to basically run their application in the cloud. We built a gateway to their own premises data center and they go into the Windows Virtual Desktop and they can authenticate using Azure AD and then they can access their on-premises application. It's basically the transition from being on-site all the time to working from home. It's a smooth transition because of Azure AD.

The solution's ease of use is one of its most valuable features. You can access it anywhere and the integration into existing and some legacy applications is good. You can plug into single sign-on self-service, password reset, or conditional access. If you're inside, you don't need to do multi-factor authentication, MFA's, built-in. 

The licensing could be improved. There are premium one, premium two or P1, P2 licensing right now and a lot of organizations are a little bit confused about the licensing information that they have. They want to know how much they're spending. It's not really clear cut. 

Transitioning to the cloud is very difficult. They need the training to make it easier. They should probably put in more training or even include it on the licensing so that there are people that manage their environment have somewhere to come to learn on their own. Maybe there could be some workshop or training within Azure. 

The solution could offer better notifications. They do upgrades once or twice a year. They need to do a better job of alerting users to the changes that are upcoming - especially on the portal where you manage your users and accounts. There needs to be enough time to showcase the new features so your organization is not surprised or put off by sudden changes. 

I've been at this organization since 2016, and therefore have been working with the solution for four years.

The solution is pretty stable. Once in a while, we get notifications and do a health check if some things are not working or there is some feature or some issue that is acting up. However, that is very seldom.

Scalability is really not a problem. You don't have to really worry about that as it's more of a service. It's not like having your own AD that you need to span the main controllers or to purchase hardware. Scalability from 250 users all the way up to a hundred thousand users can be accommodated easily.

Technical support can be hit and miss sometimes. You get like a first-year technician and you don't get the right person. It gets bounced around and eventually, it's either we fix it or somebody's smart enough to know what the issue is. If I was going to rate it from one to 10, say 10 is the best and one is worst, I'd rate it at 7.5 or so.

We've been doing implementations for a while now so for us the initial setup is straightforward. It becomes complex if a company is coming from a complex environment in the beginning, however, nowadays it's straightforward.

While planning, the first thing we do is an assessment and then we go to the design phase from the assessment on what the company has. Then, from the design phase, we designed the Azure infrastructure and do the implementation. The first thing is, of course, the identity. In general, deployment takes two or sometimes three months.

The initial investment is high due to the migration if you have a legacy environment like an on-premise Active Directory. However, after that initial investment, you're just paying for the license to hold your information and that has your Active Directory. There's a return on investment probably after few months. In that time, you'll get your money spent back due to the fact that you don't have to purchase a lot of hardware initially. The initial investment is really only to migrate your information or your data. That's where there are costs for a company usually.

It's offered as a service. We're using the latest version. We use it with various versions of the cloud (public, private, cloud). That said, a lot of the time the organization also has already some Active Directory on-premises, and that is something that we help out with in terms of bringing them to the cloud, to the Azure Active Directory.

I'd advise new users not to be afraid to go to the cloud. The cloud has a lot of benefits, including software as a service, SaaS applications. You don't have to worry about hardware updates, or maintaining a license for different applications. Just go start small. If you're worried, start as a hybrid, which is most of the time maybe 80%, 90%. You can go from lift and shift to Azure Active Directory. If you're a new company, just go right to the cloud. It's easy. You don't have the legacy infrastructure to worry about.

Going to the cloud is as secure as ever. I feel a lot of organizations when you go to the cloud, especially Azure Active Directory, think you're sharing a piece of a rack due to the fact that it's in the cloud with Azure companies. It is a bit more complicated than that. However, the security is there. Azure Active Directory and going into the cloud has been around for 13 years. It's no longer a new or scary subject.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. If they fixed little things like notifications and licensing issues, I would give them a perfect score.

We use it for the authentication of people in a hybrid configuration. In most cases,
Office 365 makes companies move to Azure Active Directory.

We have both on-premises and cloud deployments.

Its ability to provide secure connections to people at all locations is the most valuable. It is mostly used by enterprises.

The onboarding process for new users can be improved. It can be made simpler for people who have never registered to Azure AD previously and need to create an account and enable the MFA. The initial setup can be made simpler for non-IT people. 

It should be a bit simpler to use. Unless you get certifications, such as AZ-300 and AZ-301, it is not a simple thing to use at the enterprise scale.

I have been using this solution for four or five years.

I never use technical support. I usually find the information on my own or through my friends at Microsoft.

It is not complicated for me as an IT guy, but the feedback from the field or non-IT people is that it could be simpler.

MFA and P2 licenses for two Azures for fully-enabled scenarios and features cost a lot of money. This is where Okta is trying to get the prices down.

I have spent seven years at Microsoft, so I have a tendency to like Microsoft solutions because I know them and the philosophy behind them. Till now, Azure AD is probably the best solution for identity and security.

I also use Okta. For integration with Microsoft solutions, Office 365 Azure is just right. However, for some scenarios, such as consolidations, Okta seems to have a few advantages as compared to Active Directory. Okta also has a very interesting price.

I would rate Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution only for the employees. It offers a single sign-on to business applications. Internal modern applications also go through Azure Active Directory, however, we use Active Directory for the legacy ones. (Kerberos).

It takes a couple hours to add SSO to new business SaaS. The Azure AD Marketplace has all the applications we bought so far as built-in templates.

The single sign-on of the solution is the most valuable aspect.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The solution offers good bundles that include Office 365. 

The pricing is pretty decent.

The product is pretty user-friendly and offers good customization capabilities.

We find that most of the new features are in preview for too long. It gives you the announcement that there's a new feature and yet, most of the time, it takes more than one year to have it generally available. Often we have to go and sometimes just use a preview without support. 

We cannot run all the configurations from the APIs. I would like to have something that has code and to just be able to back up and apply my configuration. Right now, we are managing more Azure tenants. It's hard to keep all of those configurations at the same level, the same value.

We would like to have more granularity in the Azure conditional access in order to be able to manage more groups for applications. That way, when adding a new applications I don't have multiple conditional access to modify. 

One of the main requests from our security team is the MFA challenge. Azure, by default, is more user-friendly. We have a lot of debates with the security team here as the MFA doesn't pop up often enough for them. From an end-user perspective, it's a better user experience, as users generally prefer fewer pop-ups, however, security doesn't like it. It's hard for security to add. 

We don't have Azure Premium P2 yet, however, most of the advanced security features are in the P2, and it costs a lot more money.

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

The solution is relatively stable. The only issue we have is that there's a lot of things on Azure that are synchronous. Sometimes it takes time for changes to apply, and it kind of depends on the time of the day. A lot of the time we're happy with it, however, sometimes it creates a bizarre issue that is difficult to troubleshoot.

The solution is quite stable. If an organization needs to expand it out, they can do so rather easily.

We have about 9,000 people in our organization using the solution.

While the technical support is good, you need premium support. The standard support is more for small enterprises. We have the premium support and with the premium support, it's much better. There's a direct line to the correct type of support. It's very good.

We previously used SiteMinder from Computer Associates. The main reason we migrated to Azure was for the integration with Office 365. It then became our primary authentication source for the employees.

The initial setup is not too complex. It's pretty straightforward.

We didn't need the assistance of an integrator, reseller or consultant for deployment. We were able to handle everything in-house.

The pricing is really great and Office 365 packages are good. We don't pay for it separately. It's included in our package and the APIs are really great. I'm not sure of the exact cost of Azure. It's a package deal.

We've looked into Okta for B2B and B2C clients, not necessarily for our internal employees.

We're just a customer.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

I would recommend the solution for employees. It's a really great tool. However, we tried it also for consumers, for clients for B2B and B2C. For me, it isn't really a great production product. We researched Okta for that.

Overall, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.