Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

The primary use case of the solution is for application security and user access management.

Azure Active Directory has improved our organization because it is one of the key components and is being used by almost most companies for identifying and access management on the cloud or on-premise infrastructure.

The solution has a variety of tools. Two of the most valuable features are the ability to create users and to replicate the user account from on-premise to the cloud. 

The solution could be improved when it comes to monitoring and logging as these are the most critical areas in case something was to go wrong.

Additionally, the available zones should be in all regions, such as in AWS, they have higher availability in all regions.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for approximately ten years. 

I find the stability of the solution to be very good. The solution has improved a lot in this area.

The solution is very scalable and is easy to scale.

The technical support is great. 

I have previously used Amazon Load Balancer and AWS. 

The initial setup of the solution is very easy.  

I rate Azure Active Directory a ten.

My primary use case is for Azure Active Directory is user management, creating users, assigning them access to network resources, network drives, resetting passwords, and dissembling users.

This solution has helped my organization by allowing us simple management of identities within the organization for integration with the single sign-on system unifying access to applications for mobile devices and management. 

AD is the starting point for the unification of access control, or for using those identities within AD. Without it, we would not be able to give our users access to applications from different devices, whether they are Mac OS, Windows 10, Android, or any other operating system.

Azure Active Directory is a very simple utility to use, it has very good visibility and transparency, and an easy-to-use panel.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for approximately one year.

Azure Active Directory's stability is very high.

The scalability is good.

The technical support could improve by having a faster response time.

I rate the support of Azure Active Directory a three out of five.

If you have been running an on-premises implementation of Active Directory Domain Services, then it is only a migration. You migrate the identities from on-premises to the cloud. 

If you are setting it up from scratch, it can be easy too. You can do the migration by using Azure AD Connect, which is mostly a straightforward process.

Everything begins with the design of the domain structure. If it is well designed, then it is simple to adopt AD from scratch. I am not sure about migrations from other implementations of identity control, but if you are starting from scratch, it is very easy to use.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Azure Active Directory a nine out of ten.

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

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

We were using it in conjunction with SQL Server 2019.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I did not have to contact Microsoft technical support.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're using Azure Active Directory for MFA.

It is very usable and easy to use.

It is easy to manage. I can manage systems with policies and automate our systems. Any professional system can be easily integrated with Azure Active Directory. It is widely used with Windows versions. 

Four years ago, we had an issue with Azure AD. We wanted to reverse sync from Azure AD to on-prem Active Directory, but we couldn't achieve this. Azure AD could connect only in one way, for example, from your site to Azure. If you needed to do the reverse and connect from Azure to on-prem, there was no way to achieve it. We asked Microsoft, and they told us that they don't support it.

Their support should be faster and more knowledgeable and customer-friendly.

I have been using this solution for maybe four years.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. I don't know about the number of users that we have currently, but at the time I managed its synchronization, there were maybe 800 users. 

We're not satisfied with their support. We couldn't get support from Microsoft directly, and we made an agreement with a company. We weren't satisfied with their support. They were very slow and not friendly. They couldn't solve our problems because our program was very complex.

I didn't use any other solution. I only use Active Directory and Azure AD.

I installed hybrid Exchange. It was very easy for us. Its installation took a very short time. There was a connector system on Exchange, and we just had to set up the connection. It was very easy.

I installed it myself.  

Its maintenance is very cheap and easy. We have only two engineers to manage Azure AD and Azure Exchange.

We have an agreement with Microsoft, and my company pays yearly.

It is a very good product. I plan to keep using it because it is very easy to manage.

If you use an application in Azure and you want single sign-on for Azure products, you should prefer using Azure AD. You should synchronize your on-premise Active Directory to Azure AD. We synchronized Active Directory with Azure AD for single sign-on. For example, if a worker wants to sign in on your computer with the same user ID and password, he or she can connect to Azure services. Azure AD provides support for this.

I would rate Azure Active Directory a nine out of 10. 

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.

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

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

The scalability of the solution is good.

Technical support can be helpful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use it to have better security and better control over PCs and clients.

The ability to see and control PCs and mobile devices is the most valuable. I can see where they are and how many we have. I can also see the age and retention of PCs.

The only issue with Azure AD is that it doesn't have control over the wifi network. You have to do something more to have a secure wifi network. To have it working, you need an active directory server on-premises to take care of the networks.

I have been using Microsoft products for a really long time. I have been using cloud solutions for a couple of years.

It is stable and working for us.

They don't give support to the end users in Sweden. We always have to go to a reseller, which is a bad thing.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We didn't do it ourselves. A company did it for us.

We are a non-profit organization, so we get good prices from Microsoft for their products. It is working well, but it could be cheaper. For the type of organization we are, it would be good if they could give a little bit more and be more generous like Google, which has completely free services. Microsoft has free versions or web services called Office 365 E1, which is free for use, but we want to have it with more qualified clients.

I would advise getting some help from professionals to implement it. You have to implement it in a very planned way with a very detailed roadmap.

I would rate Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium an eight out of ten. It is quite good, and we are quite pleased with this solution.