Microsoft has introduced another suite of products targeting identity and access solutions.
The company announced Microsoft Entra to the world as a way to show the company’s “expanded vision” for identity and access solutions.
Summary:
What is Microsoft Entra?
- Microsoft Entra is a new product family from Microsoft that touches on identity and access capabilities, including Azure Active Directory.
- The main problem the company wants to tackle is how digital access seems hard to plan with all the possible scenarios.
- This is timely as the sheer number of connections between apps, devices, and people is great.
- Unfortunately, organizations also find it hard to address the risks that come with these connections — which holds their innovation efforts back.
The Microsoft Entra Product Family Includes:
- Azure Active Directory
- Permissions Management
- Verified ID
1. Azure Active Directory
- The entire suite more or less centers around the Microsoft Azure AD.
- Naturally, this includes the native features everybody loves, including conditional access and password-less authentication.
- Azure AD empowers organizations to manage and secure identities for employees, partners, and customers to access the applications and services they need.
- Azure AD provides an identity solution that integrates broadly, from on-premises legacy apps to thousands of top software as a service (SaaS) applications, delivering a seamless end-user experience and improved visibility and control.
Azure AD is an integrated cloud identity solution that enables access to applications and protects identities, apps, workloads, and devices.
This includes features such as:
- Secure, adaptive access
- Seamless user experiences
- Unified identity management
- Simplified identity governance
2. Microsoft Entra Permissions Management
- Microsoft acquired CloudKnox Permissions Management, rebranded it as its own, and made it part of Microsoft Entra.
- Permissions Management is the suite’s cloud infrastructure entitled Management (CIEM) component.
- It provides comprehensive visibility into permissions assigned to all identities – users and workloads – actions and resources across cloud infrastructures and identity providers. It detects, right-sizes, and monitors unused and excessive permissions and enables Zero Trust security through least privilege access in Microsoft Azure, AWS, and GCP.
- Discover all cloud permissions
- Evaluate your permission risks
- Management permissions and access
- Monitor permissions continuously
3. Microsoft Entra Verified ID
Imagine giving users the ability to control their own credentials.
That’s essentially what Microsoft Entra Verified ID is. It’s an identity verification solution that creates issues and verifies decentralized identity credentials.
The magic here is that this system instantly verifies digital identities. This leads to improved collaboration and provides the right access level for the users.
Diagram illustrates the participation of three parties in a verifiable credentials interaction. This solution automates the verification of identity credentials and claims.
The verifier is an organization that requests proof and, upon receipt, verifies that claims in credentials satisfy requirements.
The user receives and approves the request for credentials obtained from the issuer and presents it to the verifier. The credential claims are cryptographically signed with the user’s private key.
The issuer is an organization that attests to claims and grants digitally signed credentials to the user.
An ecosystem of organizations, workplaces, governments, schools, institutions, and individuals act as trusted issuers and verifiers for verifiable credentials, with users granting permission and managing access through their digital wallet. The capabilities of this component include:
- Easy setup and deployment
- Create and issue verified IDs
- Verify credentials
- Suspend or invalidate credentials
Conclusion
Microsoft Entra is a new product offering that enables your business with Microsoft’s identity and access tools. Microsoft Azure AD, Entra Permissions Management, and Entra Verified ID can help provide secure access to your employees faster so that they can get back to work without obstructions. If you’ve been thinking about using Microsoft Entra to enhance your identity and access capabilities, Get Your Free Consultation.
Cloud Engineer
Gabriel Chutuape
A technology enthusiast passionate about automation, Gabriel Chutuape is a Cloud Engineer at ISmile Technologies. He’s part of the ISmile Technologies Cloud enablement team that help customers to design/solution/project engineering, integrating and implementing infrastructure technologies & services.
CLOUD ENGINEER
Mahaboob Khan
A Cloud Engineer at ISmile Technologies, he had extensive experience working on Microsoft Azure which involves activities like Implementation, Managing and troubleshooting the User related issues. With automation tools like Azure ARM Template, Terraform, and Azure DevOps, he helps our client to automate deployment of IaaS and PaaS services.
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