Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

We use Azure AD to manage all endpoints, including laptops, desktops, mobile devices, such as iPads and iPhones, and users. We can disable accounts, create accounts, reset passwords, maintain access, and manage permissions.

Azure AD is essential to our organization. Our users need to use their Azure AD credentials to log into their computers every morning, and we also manage user accounts in Azure AD. As a result, we cannot function without Azure AD.

We use Entra's conditional access to restrict access to our system from overseas users. This means that users can only log in from Canada and the United States.

Our zero-trust strategy uses conditional access to verify users and prevent unexpected traffic, such as attacks from Russia. This makes our strategy more robust and secure.

We use Entra's conditional access in conjunction with Microsoft Endpoint Manager to limit user logins from Canada and the USA. We also limit devices that can log into the network to only those located in Canada.

Entra has helped our IT administrators save an hour of time per day.

Entra has helped our organization save money.

We used to use on-premises Active Directory. Now, we use Azure Active Directory. The main difference is that users can now reset their own passwords in Azure AD. This is a positive improvement, as it saves time and hassle for both users and IT staff. I believe that this has had a positive impact on our employee experience.

User and device management is the most valuable feature.

I would like Azure AD to provide features similar to check-in on-prem AD. The fetch-all service is the only one that is not currently available on Azure AD.

The technical support has room for improvement.

I have been using Azure AD for five years.

I give Azure AD's stability an eight out of ten.

I give Azure AD's scalability an eight out of ten.

The basic support from Microsoft is not good.

Negative

We previously used the on-premises Microsoft Active Directory. However, we have since switched to Azure Active Directory, which is a cloud-based solution. Azure AD is more flexible and scalable than on-premises AD, and it allows us to save money on hardware costs. This is because we no longer need to purchase and maintain our own servers. Instead, we can simply use the servers that are provided by Microsoft.

The initial deployment was straightforward and took two months to complete. We switched over to the new system and then set up a number of additional features, such as enterprise applications and multi-factor authentication. This took an additional month, for a total of three months. We followed the instructions from Microsoft step-by-step. The deployment required two full-time employees from our organization and three from our partner.

The implementation was completed with the help of an MSP.

We have seen a significant return on investment since switching to Azure AD. Our monthly costs have decreased from $5,000 to $100.

The price is affordable, and we pay around $100 per month.

Both Okta and Azure AD are great solutions. I know that many people use Okta, but my concern is that we are also using Microsoft products on the endpoint. This means that our users use Windows, and it makes more sense to use a front-end and back-end Microsoft solution.

I give Azure AD a nine out of ten.

Azure AD requires very minimal maintenance.

I recommend Azure AD. The solution is straightforward.

We're using the solution for our customers. It's for those that may have been on-premises and moved to the cloud when it started to become mainstream. Users wanted to transfer their users and permissions and so on to the cloud and onto Azure.

Azure is the most comfortable cloud to work with. One company we worked with had infrastructure that needed to go to the cloud, and with Microsoft, it's very easy to move. The company is flexible in terms of how you want to handle a migration or configuration. There are a lot of features that help to implement different solutions and that makes it very easy to work with. 

We are using the solution on different projects. Depending on the project, we use different features. It's great for handling user groups and security policies.

We can use it with Office 365 and Exchange. 

It provides a single pane of glass.

It's given us good consistency in terms of the user's sign-on experience.

Microsoft makes a very good product. It makes the policies quite easy and everything is quite understandable. It provides different tools to implement the same scenario.

The admin center for managing all identity and access risks across an organization is very cool. 

Verified ID is very useful for onboarding remote employees. It helps with privacy control of identity data. It makes security very easy. It makes it simple to protect the client. This feature helps IT and other teams protect the business.

We used permission management about a year ago. I had some experience with AWS. I didn't use GCP. Mostly we use Azure. In our case, when we implemented it with the current client, we didn't have any issues with it. It was clear and very simple. It has helped us in a few cases reduce risk when it comes to identity permissions.

Sometimes the client doesn't need the full functionality; they just need a small part of it - and it still works in those cases.

The product has helped us save time in IT and HR. If you create your directory with some logic, it allows you to streamline tasks. It can help more quickly handle requests. The management aspect helps simplify user interactions with various departments.

Azure has very good services that showcase how much money you are spending. It gives you advice on how to protect yourself from spending too much money. It's helpful when we have new clients. You can show them the financials from Microsoft and it will help illustrate how much it costs, and how much it will cost if you scale. It's very transparent on how much money you would spend depending on the setup. 

It's had a positive effect on the employee user experience. 

Sometimes it is difficult to understand the structure of the menu. Sometimes they make some changes in the configuration structure and you might have trouble finding a button or some functionality based on a UI update. That can be annoying. Too many interface changes can make it confusing. 

The documentation could be better. Microsoft documentation is confusing. We do not like working with documents. There is not one big website where you can find whatever you want. Instead, there are thousands of websites that cover certain parts or services. On top of that, they often have old, out-of-date information that hasn't been checked. This is the most difficult part of dealing with Microsoft. 

I've used the solution for almost four and a half years.

The solution hasn't had any downtime. Everything works perfectly.

We've had some issues with performance around scalability. When we tried to deploy in certain areas, we didn't have enough scalability. This was an unusual situation. Typically, scalability is not an issue, however. 

Sometimes we contact technical support, however, not usually during the initial setup. We tend to fix any issues by ourselves. 

Microsoft has different support teams in different countries. Who you speak to depends on what service you are using.

Automatically, your request is sent to a certain team or location. We have had a lot of issues with the Azure DevOps team, which is routed to India and the level of support is much lower. We had to have multiple calls to close a very simple task.

Positive

I have not used any other different solution previously. 

I was involved in the initial deployment. The setups are always complex. 

How long it takes to deploy depends on the client. We've done it in two days or one week. However, the main work is typically done across two days.

We tend to have two to three people involved in the implementation. 

It doesn't require any maintenance on our side. 

Typically, we always do the setup by ourselves. We handle the setups for the clients. We sometimes ask Microsoft for input.

Microsoft has various pricing tiers. 

I've read about Okta, however, I have never used it or evaluated it.

We are a Microsoft gold partner. 

I've used the conditional access feature, however, not very often.

If your company has more than ten users, you need this service. It gives you a lot of features to help manage your organization. A small startup with a handful of employees likely won't need it. However, if you have an organization with a financial department, a developer department, et cetera, it will get complicated handling access and permissions. Without this solution, you can't be sure you'll be safe - especially as you scale up your employees.

We use different models, including on-premises and cloud.

If you are a regular user, you don't need any special knowledge. However, if you are a technician, you can take exams from Microsoft and find materials about the product and really learn about it. That said, anyone can get a sense of the product simply by searching for it on YouTube.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

The Authenticator app is a client application on your smartphone, usually, and you configure your profile in the cloud. I use it with my Android smartphone. 

This is a Microsoft standalone application, which the user installs usually on a mobile device, either iOS-based or in my case, Android-based. Then you add your enterprise accounts into the Microsoft Authenticator app, your work account from Microsoft 365, or your whatever on-premise account, which makes uses the Azure or whatever IDP, identity provider so that you can do single sign-on or multi-factor sign-ins.

It's an authenticator. How it's used really depends on the use case that it is configured with. If you are using your Microsoft 365 work account, if your organization requires you to do multi-factor authentication, not just with the username and password, with an additional factor like the Microsoft Authenticator app, then it simply offers that extra level of protection and security.

You can manage locally additional pathways or passwords. You can collect your credit card information or whatever secret notices in the authenticate app. This is something that got the addition the last couple of years.

You could use it for different use cases. 

The Azure AD-integrated single sign-on scenarios are the most useful due to the fact that, if you are in a cloud application that you have on your smartphone, the Authenticator just requests you to allow or deny the access as a factor. Other applications require a token where you have to enter in an additional pin. Having the single sign-on or the multi-factor way with just allowing the application with one tap to authenticate is really smart.

The solution is free to use and you can use it for every service.

They recently redid the user interface a few months ago and it looks good.

I've found the solution to be stable and scalable. 

Adding a new account can be tricky. I do it a lot and therefore am used to it, however, if you don't you tend to forget the process. If you had a bottom menu and the settings menu, for example, be added to the bottom menu instead of a different place, the top right corner, it might be more intuitive.

One area of improvement is always with global offerings from large companies where we have a lot of users that require help. Users need videos, et cetera, in their own language, and in German, there is not much from Microsoft. These are products that have a very, very fast life cycle. They upgrade the services and applications in a very high rhythm every couple of months, and even Microsoft does not have the resources to offer the learning material in all the regions, however, they offer their services.

We have then to add some additional use via manuals of how to set up, et cetera, as we have users that are not willing or cannot understand videos in English that come from Microsoft.

I've been using the solution for two to three years. It might even be longer than that.

The solution is stable. I haven't had any problems so far. 

The product scales well. 

The goal is to have everyone using it. We are in the rollout phase, and in my organization of about 1,500 users, after a couple of weeks, we have maybe a third of the population starting to use the application. 

This is like this every rollout. It takes a couple of weeks to a month. In the end, we will have around 7,500 users using Microsoft Authenticator or the Microsoft multi-factor authenticator service that allows you to choose different factors. We have a lot of things using the Authenticator app. 

We have central support organizations and I don't access Microsoft support myself. Therefore, I can't speak to their level of service.

I've used many authenticator applications. I used already Microsoft Authenticator when it came out, maybe five, six, or seven years ago. Then I used Google Authenticator and other authenticator applications. You can, however, use these all in parallel. For example, if you mix your private and your work accounts in the same applications, or if your smartphone is managed by your company and you want to separate your private accounts from any corporate policy that can delete your smartphone, you can use different authenticators for different purposes. Right now, I have the Authenticator app in front of me, and I have seven accounts configured, and this is a mix of private and corporate or work accounts.

The initial setup is easy. You just download it and start using it. 

We don't need to worry about maintenance. This is a service from Microsoft.

The solution doesn't cost anything to use.

I'm the Chief Security officer of our organization. I always have to do some research on these topics.

I'm a Microsoft customer.

I'd advise any user to use MFA these days. There's not just war in Ukraine. There's also war in this kind of space and a multi-factor authentication method is a must just to make your cyber life a little bit safer at least.

I'd rate the product eight out of ten.

The solution is our main authentication on our authorization platform to get access to our resources.

The solution is deployed on cloud with Microsoft Azure as the provider. We have around 100 people using this solution in my organization. 

We're using the whole suite: device management, user credentials, everything that's possible.

I would not recommend any changes or improvements right now, in terms of the organization. I think something that is key would be the group policies replication over the cloud, in order to prevent or to avoid relying on the on-premise Active Directory servers and to manage group policies.

I have been using this solution for a year.

The solution is stable.

It is scalable.

We have plans to increase usage. We have been increasing over the past year. I believe we started with about 30 people, and now we have almost 100.

We have only contacted technical support once or twice in the last year. They were very simple tasks.

Setup was very simple initially. Deployment took no more than six weeks, and we only needed two people.

We used a partner to help us and guide us on the deployment.

The licensing costs are yearly. There is a standard fee per user.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.

With a more complex environment, more complex tools are implemented. My thoughts are that they need to have a right and current inventory of applications that are compatible with single sign-on to properly implement that functionality, for example.

We use Azure Active Directory for quite a few things. We use it for security group management of authorized principals who need access to get SSH-signed certificates for user logins. We use it for automated jot-based (JSON Web Token) self sign-on for our lowest, least privileged credentials on certain products. We also use AAD for B2B coordination of SSO when we're bringing users onto our platform, where they have Active Directory on their side. We use the OIDC-based SSO flows through AAD to merge project-level AADs back to our corporate AAD for internal single sign-on flows.

• There is tech support to help with any OIDC-based setups between organizations.
• It has good support for SAML 2.0 and OIDC-based setups for our remote identity providers.

The solution has come a long way. Now, with the Azure AD B2C offering integrated as well, we've got a full IAM-type solution for our customer-facing identity management. In addition, when it comes to user journeys we now can hook in custom flows for different credential checking and authorizations for specific conditional access. 

I don't think the documentation is where it needs to be yet, for user journeys and that type of flow. There is still trial and error that I would like to see cleaned up.

Also, they do have support for SAML 2.0 and it's very easy to set up linkages to other Active Directory customers. But if somebody is using an IdP or an identity solution other than Active Directory, that's where you have to start jumping through some hoops. So far, our largest customers are all using Active Directory, but I don't think the solution is quite as third-party-centric as Okta or Auth0. Those solutions have a lot of support for all kinds of IdPs you want to link up to.

Finally, a couple of months ago I was on a team that was looking at low-cost MFA for SSO, where we would control the MFA on our side, instead of having the remote database handle it. In those kinds of flows, there aren't as many off-the-shelf options as I would like. There were cost implications, if I recall, to turn on 2FA. Also, the linkages that they had set up off-the-shelf—obviously they had the Authenticator app—meant that if you wanted to do something with Duo Mobile or any of the other popular 2FA providers, it seems it might have taken us more time than we wanted to put into it.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for a couple of years now.

The stability is great.

The scalability is also great.

We have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft, so we aren't typical folks. Through that agreement, we get a dedicated technical account manager and that person is able to escalate tickets when necessary. I have found Microsoft to be very responsive when needed, although we haven't really needed them that often.

We use Azure a lot, and therefore, AAD was an obvious choice and we thought, "Why not use it?"

They've done a good job on OIDC. That was a pretty simple, seamless setup. We've done that with multiple remote IdPs now, and I don't recall too many issues there.

There is much less cost investment going into it now. We didn't have to do a volume buy to get onto the platform. When it comes to ROI, there is low friction and a high, immediate return on investment.

It's relatively inexpensive in comparison with third-party solutions. It's highly available and supported by Microsoft Azure in our enterprise agreements. With the addition of their B2C tenants, it's hard to beat from a cost perspective now.

They changed their pricing for B2B access. You used to need shared licenses so that, if you were paying for a Premium AAD on your side, that would allow you to have five shared external mapped users. They've blown that all up and it's now dirt cheap. It works out to pennies per user per month, instead of dollars. A P1 user license in their system was $6 per user per month, which is cost-prohibitive for a lot of B2B SSO flows, but now it's down in the pennies range.

Azure AD is primarily integrated with all of the Microsoft services, such as Microsoft 365, Office 365, and Dynamics 365/Power Apps. Behind the scenes, we are, in one way or another, using Azure AD for our application security, identity management, and to access purpose services. At times, we need to configure some advanced features to provide access and identity to third-party apps to integrate with Dynamic 365. 

Unfortunately, I don't have any numbers and metrics related to organizational improvement off-hand.

That said, using Azure AD app services, we don't have to care about secure access to our Dynamics 365 data. Azure AD performs the authentication on behalf of our application and that's great. We don't have to implement security on our side to secure access for third-party services or third-party software or applications.

Azure B2C has also helped us in providing secure access to the Power Apps portal, or external content.

The app registration services are great. This basically simplifies security in order to give access to third-party apps from within Microsoft services such as Dynamics 365 and Power Apps. We can do this in a very secure manner using the AD. This really very simplifies the identity and access management for us.  

I use Azure B2C for providing access to external users. It was a really great experience to configure Azure AD B2C. I like this feature, as it provides a single sign-on for existing or new users; even new Azure AD users can be provided with sign-ins to our portal.

The solution has features that have helped improve our security posture. For example, without Azure B2C or any third-party identity service like Google or Gmail, we are compelled to store users' credentials and sensitive data in Dynamics 365 contact table somewhere. By using Azure B2C, we are totally independent of this.

The solution hasn’t affected the end-user experience. Usually, users are not so IT aware, so they don't feel an impact related to the change. We know that having secure access for them is important for them and also for us, however, they don’t feel any noticeable difference with the extra security in place.

Honestly speaking, I haven't thought about where areas of improvement might be necessary.

Everything was very smooth every time we used Azure AD. In other Microsoft solutions, we come across some bugs or workarounds, et cetera. However, as far as Azure AD is concerned, or maybe, to the extent that we are using it at least, we haven't come across any issues.

In terms of identity and access management and concerns, all of our needs are provided by the existing implemented features.

I have been using the advanced feature of Azure AD for the last three years or so.

Currently, Azure AD and most of the Azure services are very, very stable. A couple of years ago, I experienced some difficulty in implementing the solutions, the services of Azure AD. In one instance, I was not able to configure Azure AD for a registration. This was two or three years ago. However, currently, the documentation is very clear and there are no loopholes or anything that could hinder even a simple IT administrator to implement these services.

I am just using the product for integration with Dynamics 365 and Power Apps solutions. Right now, we are integrating with Azure AD in a very simple manner. I'm not sure if we plan to expand usage.

In our company, 100 to 200 people are connecting to PowerApps portals using Azure AD B2C.

There are two or three developers right now who use Azure AD for identity and access management purposes. Managers will not be using Azure AD in that it is not used to configure and trigger solutions using Azure.

We haven't used customer support contact up to this point. Everything that we need is already provided through the documentation. So far, we haven't had any need to contact customer support for Azure AD.

We did not use a different solution before we used Azure AD. We only use Microsoft solutions.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The documentation is very good and the steps are very well documented. I remember three years ago I encountered some undocumented feature or maybe a bug when configuring Azure AD for apps registration. However, lately, this is not the case. Currently, the documentation is very up-to-date and very clear, and almost every time I register the user, the apps in Azure AD, and configuration the Azure B2C have helpful documentation. They probably made some form of an update to the system that fixed any past bugs or issues.

The deployment hardly takes 15 to 30 minutes - and that's for app registration. To complete the whole process on the Azure AD side and on our Dynamics 365 side - including Azure B2C - it took, when I implemented it for the first time, one hour to set up everything. That was the first time. Since then, I've gotten faster and it now hardly takes 30 to 40 minutes to configure Azure B2C.

We are an IT company ourselves. A hundred percent of the time we use our own skills and documentation to implement everything related to Azure AD and Dynamics 365 or anything else.

We have seen an ROI due to the fact that it integrates with other Microsoft services very seamlessly. In that sense, it definitely saves time and cost as opposed to implementing something that we don't know, such as other identity systems. 

I don't know much about the pricing. As far as licensing is concerned, there are two options. There is a set of free services that are offered through a free license and if you have a Microsoft tenant or any Microsoft service such as Dynamics 365 or Power Apps, you have access to a free set of services that Azure AD provides. This includes registration and some other items. 

If you want to use Azure AD's advanced features, they are not provided for free. There are two types of premium licenses that are available for anyone who is a registered licensed user.

We did not evaluate different solutions before we chose Azure AD. This is due to the fact that, in the Microsoft ecosystem, Azure AD fits best in terms of providing access and identity management to all of the other Microsoft online services.

We are a Microsoft partner.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. This is an online service. As I'm a Dynamics 365/Power Apps developer, usually I don't bother to check what version of Azure AD is currently hosting on the online services.

I would advise new users, if they are using Microsoft online services, that Azure AD is the best choice for all identity and access management requirements. This is due to the fact that it is in the same ecosystem. It understands the needs of its own vendors much better compared to any other external identity service.

I'd rate the solution a perfect ten out of ten.

Azure AD is where our primary user data is stored. We get a feed-in from our HCM solution and it creates our users, and then that's where we store all of their authorizations, group memberships, and other relevant details.

We access it through the Azure Portal.

This product has helped improve our security posture because it allows a tie-in into the Microsoft Azure Sentinel product very easily and seamlessly. From a security standpoint, you have the option of conditional access, the option of identity protection, and those types of things. We have incorporated those right into our offering.

Overall, security-wise, this solution has allowed us to be more flexible. When you had just Active Directory and it was an on-premise solution, you had to do a lot of manipulation to get SaaS products working. You had to do a lot of customizing and those types of things. With Azure Active Directory, it's more configuration than it is customization. This allows us to be a lot more flexible, which brings about efficiency, better security, and other benefits.

Azure Active Directory has also improved our end-user experience.

Before, most companies including ours would use a customized username that would have random characters for a user. This is different from Azure Active Directory, which uses what looks like the email address as your username. In fact, it can be set up as a genuine email address. Where it differs is on the back end, where it has a unique ID, but on the front end, it's more readable and it's better understandable.

From my user experience, the sign-on is seamless as you go through and use any of Microsoft products. Everything ties right into it, and then as you set up your different applications that are tied into Azure Active Directory, and get the single sign-on, everything becomes a whole lot easier to connect into. From a user experience, it's improved it drastically.

For provisioning users, you start by registering an application as either an enterprise application or a custom application. You can set up from within Azure Active Directory how it is that users connect to it. Microsoft has done a great job with providing a lot of application templates that help to connect and add it into the cloud. Almost every application that you could think of is there. From that point, you can set up provisioning.

To assist with provisioning, they have great documentation. From an admin perspective, much of the work is done for you. After the applications are connected to Azure Active Directory, you assign users and groups, provisioning users via API calls, which is how it's done on the back end, and it ties in using service accounts. Then, you can create a group that has the appropriate permissions such as write permission, full admin rights, or contributor rights, and then provision users into those groups. The system automatically handles it for you at that point.

This product is easy to use.

The features that we use day in and day out are single sign-on, group capabilities, and provisioning capabilities. All of these are very useful.

This product has features such as Conditional Access that improve our security posture. Conditional access gives access only through a timeframe. We have certain policies that we set up, which could be a certain amount of time or it could be a certain type of access. These are examples of types of conditional access.

Another example of a security feature that helps us is Identity Protection, which will perform the automatic detection and remediation of risks.

We also have the ability to go in and investigate any risks using data within the portal, and it's all automated. It's nice in that sense.

These features have significantly improved our security posture and time for remediation. It would be difficult to estimate a time improvement in terms of a percentage, but being that it's automated and there is a portal that displays the risks in real-time, it's a very significant change. Previously, we had to go through and look at logs and those types of things, which was time-consuming compared to using the portal.

We also use multi-factor authentication, which is very useful because that gives another layer of security protection for our users. You have to have some sort of device that you can use to provide that second factor, and not just your username and password.

The provisioning capability is a two-edged sword because it is very useful, but it also needs some improvement. When you start to deal with legacy applications, provisioning is not as intuitive. Legacy applications, a lot of times, were based on an on-premise Active Directory and you had to use it to provision users or grant access to the product. I don't know of a way to make Azure Active Directory act as an on-premises version to connect to those legacy applications.

The speed and responsiveness of the technical support are things that could use some improvement.

We have been using Azure Active Directory since October of 2018, nearly three years ago.

The stability is not too bad. It's usually other issues that go on within Microsoft Azure. Whenever Microsoft Azure is down, the Azure Active Directory service sometimes can be down intermittently, depending on where things are at.

It is important to remember that it's not always the Azure Active Directory component that is down. Rather, a lot of the time, there is an app that is tied into Azure Active Directory causing the problem. I think we've had one incident in the last year that was tied directly to Azure Active Directory, where it was down from a SaaS perspective.

This solution scales very well. We were able to tie into our previous company and then bring on all of those users in a very quick amount of time. This included making sure that they could all log in and get access. We haven't really had any issues from that standpoint.

In terms of the users, you can add B2B and you can add B2C, as well. Scalability-wise, it's been good for us. We have between 15,000 and 20,000 users, which is fully scaled at the moment.

We have plans to do further B2B, as we work with our retail partners. We have a lot of retail partners, which is how our business model is structured, and that's something that we're planning on adding and moving forward with.

As far as scaling, going up, or going down, our numbers of Azure Active Directory users are pretty much what they're going to be for the next couple of years. That said, our B2B is definitely going to increase over the same period.

We use Covenant Technology Partners as the first level of technical support. Most of our support tickets actually get escalated from them up to the Microsoft product team.

The Microsoft product team's service is hit or miss, which is something that Microsoft can improve on. They are sometimes slower to react than we would like, but for the most part, they do take our tickets and work on them as they can, to try to figure out ways of remediation.

We did not have any solution prior to this; it was simply an on-premises Active Directory. We were spinning up something brand new to move forward. Being managed saves a lot of time and effort. We migrated our users over from the Active Directory that the prior owners had, but they managed it all, we did not.

It was very easy to get set up and running. Basically, you log into the Azure portal, you have your tenant that you're already connected into, you add a domain and then you just go. You add your first user and then you continue from there.

Our deployment started in October of that year, we had our first users within a week, and then we pretty much provisioned all of our users within a month. It was a pretty quick turnaround.

At the time of deployment, we were in the middle of a divestiture. As such, our implementation strategy included spinning up a brand new Active Directory so that we could start to migrate our users over from our previous owners into a new one that we would control. Consequently, we started from scratch.

I know that a lot of companies are not doing that. Rather, many are starting with an Active Directory and then moving into Azure Active Directory, but for us, it was a clean slate. We then started to incorporate methods of synching with our previous owner so that we could get all of the data from them and continue to march towards a separation.

We brought in consultants only because we didn't have the manpower at the time when we got started. I believe there was one other person besides myself, we were both at the director level, and neither of us had been given the time to build out our teams by that point. The third-party consulting company that we brought in assisted us to help us and assist us in getting everything set up and built out.

The company was Covenant Technology Partners and our experience with them was very good. They were able to help us get everything set up and running right away. Overall, it went very smoothly.

With respect to day-to-day maintenance, we have a lot of it automated. We've tied it into ServiceNow and a lot of our user additions, modifications, deletions, and other operations are things that we have automated via ServiceNow workflow.

I do have a team of three engineers under a manager that currently manages it, but they don't spend any more than probably 5% of their time, daily, dealing with it.

It is difficult to estimate our return when we didn't own anything beforehand. There is no real basis for comparison. That said, the automation capabilities cut down manual provisioning, manual adding, removing, deletion, editing, and those types of things, of user fields. I would say those are the big savings, and it's helpful that you can easily do the automation tie-in into Azure Active Directory.

Anytime you are dealing with Microsoft and licensing, it is always interesting. We have various levels of their licensing, which includes users on different levels of their enterprise offering. For example, some are on E3, whereas others are on E5. The differences between them have to do with the various features that we use.

We're a Microsoft Teams company and we use it not only for collaboration and instant messaging, but we also use it as our phone system. We did all of that together, so when we spun up Azure Active Directory, we also spun out Microsoft teams to use as our phones and flipped off of an old PBX system. It's been very useful but the licensing can be complicated when you get into the retail partners and guests. But for the most part, Microsoft has done a good job of explaining the different levels and what we need and has given us the proper licensing.

There are no additional fees for Azure Active Directory.

We did not evaluate other vendors. Our plan was to implement Microsoft Azure as our cloud solution, as well as go forward with Azure Active Directory. That was the plan from the get-go.

I know that Okta was out there, as well as a couple of other options, but that was never really a consideration for us.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is that because it is a SaaS solution, it's easy to get set up and configured. It doesn't take a lot of overhead to run and quite honestly, the security on it is getting better. Microsoft continues to pump more security features into it.

My advice for anybody who is considering Azure Active Directory is that if you have Microsoft products that you are currently already using, I would definitely recommend it. This is a solution that seamlessly ties into your Office products, and into any Microsoft product, and it's really easy to manage. You can spin it up quickly, implement it, and get going right away. You are able to tie into your on-premise Active Directory as well. At that point, you can start to sync those two to manage all of your users and all of your groups in one place.

Overall, this is a good product and to me it's perfect but at the same time, nothing is perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The solution acted as a source of truth for everyone internally and those we collaborated with externally. We deployed it in the cloud, so many of our users are remote and spread across the country.

The features around permissions are excellent.

The general usability of the site could be improved.

The ease of use regarding finding audit information for users could also be improved.

We want to see better integration with other Microsoft 365 products; it's a separate tool, but they all need to work together.

We've been using Azure Active Directory for about four years. 

The product is very stable; I rate it nine out of ten for stability.

Azure AD is very scalable; I rate it nine out of ten for scalability. 

The customer service needs improvement; it takes a long time to open a ticket and get it resolved.

Neutral

We previously used Google G Suite and switched to Azure AD for better security, and to match the platform our clients are using to allow easier collaboration with them.

The initial deployment was straightforward, although we initially found it challenging to understand how to use Azure AD to manage access and permissions with external parties. We carried out the setup using three staff; myself and the IT team.

We have seen an ROI with the solution; the ability to collaborate with external partners provided tremendous value. 

I evaluated Okta some years ago, so that information isn't fresh. 

I rate the product nine out of ten, and I recommend it.