Azure AD is becoming Microsoft Entra ID

You may not yet be too familiar with Microsoft Entra, but it’s about to become a much bigger part of your Microsoft environment.

Microsoft Azure AD, the cloud-based identity and access management solution that powers millions of organisations, is becoming Microsoft Entra ID.

This change reflects Microsoft’s vision to provide a unified and comprehensive identity platform that helps you secure your organization, empower your employees, and enable your digital transformation.

With Microsoft Entra ID, you can benefit from the latest innovations in identity protection, governance, and management, as well as seamless integration with Microsoft 365, Azure, and other cloud services.

ID Protection: Prevent account compromise with machine learning.

ID Protection helps you detect and stop identity attacks in real time. It uses advanced machine learning to identify sign-in anomalies and user behaviour that indicate a risk of compromise. For example, it can trigger a Conditional Access policy that requires strong authentication methods for accessing sensitive resources. This way, you can protect your accounts from phishing, malware, and other threats.

ID Dashboard: Monitor your identity security posture with insights and recommendations.

ID Dashboard shows you the impact of your identity protections, the most common attack patterns, and your organisation’s risk exposure. You can view metric cards and attack graphs that show risk origins, security posture over time, and types of current attacks. You can also get recommendations based on best practices and industry standards. With these insights, you can further investigate your security posture in other tools and applications.

ID Governance: Automate access governance with workflows and self-service.

ID Governance helps you ensure that only the right identities have the right access at the right time. It automates the employee identity lifecycle to reduce manual work for IT and increase employee productivity. It also provides machine learning-based insights about identities and app entitlements. You can use workflows and self-service to grant and revoke access to cloud and on-premises apps from any provider and custom-built apps hosted in the public cloud or on-premises. This way, you can comply with organizational and regulatory security requirements.