What is Microsoft Entra (and why use it)?

Microsoft Entra is a family of identity and network access products designed to implement a Zero-Trust security strategy. It is part of the Microsoft Security portfolio which also includes.

• Microsoft Defender for cyber threat protection and cloud security,

• Microsoft Sentinel for security information and event management (SIEM),

• Microsoft Purview for compliance,

• Microsoft Priva for privacy and

• Microsoft Intune for endpoint management.

Zero-trust strategy

The Zero Trust security strategy is a modern approach to cybersecurity that assumes no user or device, whether inside or outside the network, should be trusted by default. Instead, every access request must be verified and authenticated before granting access to resources. This strategy is designed to address the complexities of the modern digital environment, including remote work, cloud services, and mobile devices.

Why use Entra

Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) is a cloud-based identity and access management solution that offers several benefits over traditional on-premises solutions:

• Unified Identity Management: Entra provides a comprehensive identity and access management solution that spans across hybrid and cloud environments. This means you can manage user identities, access rights, and entitlements in a unified manner, which simplifies administration and enhances security.

• Seamless User Experiences: Entra supports Single Sign-On (SSO), allowing users to access multiple applications with a single set of credentials. This reduces password fatigue and improves user experience.

• Adaptive Access Policies: Entra enables strong authentication and real-time, risk-based adaptive access policies without compromising user experience. This helps in securing access to resources and data effectively

• Integration with External Identities: Entra External ID allows organizations to securely manage and authenticate users who are not part of their internal workforce, such as customers, partners, and other external collaborators. This is particularly useful for businesses needing to collaborate securely with external partners

• Market Challenge Addressed: Entra addresses the market challenge of providing a comprehensive IAM solution across hybrid and cloud environments that ensures security, simplifies user authentication, and enables secure access to resources

• Scalability: Cloud solutions like Entra can scale easily to accommodate growing numbers of users and applications without the need for additional hardware or infrastructure.

• Cost Efficiency: By using a cloud solution, organizations can reduce the costs associated with maintaining on-premises infrastructure, such as servers and networking equipment.

• Flexibility: Entra provides flexibility in terms of deployment and integration with various applications and services, both within and outside the Microsoft ecosystem.

• Security: Cloud solutions often come with built-in security features and regular updates to protect against emerging threats. Entra includes robust support for Conditional Access and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), which are essential for protecting sensitive data

• As you can see, you have many reasons to be excited about Entra and its suite of products.

More on Entra products

Microsoft Entra is designed to provide identity and access management, cloud-infrastructure management, and identity verification. It works on:

• On-premises.

• Across Azure, AWS, Google Cloud.

• Across Microsoft and third-party apps, websites, and devices.

Here are the key products and solutions within the Microsoft Entra product family.

1. Microsoft Entra ID: This is a comprehensive identity and access management solution. It includes features like conditional access, role-based access control, multifactor authentication, and identity protection. Entra ID helps organizations manage and protect identities, ensuring secure access to apps, devices, and data.

2. Microsoft Entra Domain Services: This product provides managed domain services such as domain join, group policy, lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP), and Kerberos/NTLM authentication. It enables organizations to run legacy applications in the cloud that can't use modern authentication methods, or where you don't want directory lookups to always go back to an on-premises Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) environment. You can lift and shift those legacy applications from your on-premises environment into a managed domain, without needing to manage the AD DS environment in the cloud.

3. Microsoft Entra Private Access provides users (in office or working remotely) secured access to private, corporate resources. It enables remote users to connect to internal resources from any device and network without requiring a virtual private network (VPN). The service offers per-app adaptive access based on Conditional Access policies, for more granular security than a VPN.

4. Microsoft Entra Internet Access secures access to Microsoft services, SaaS, and public internet apps while protecting users, devices, and data against internet threats through the identity-centric, device-aware, cloud-delivered Secure Web Gateway (SWG) of Microsoft Entra Internet Access.

5. Microsoft Entra ID Governance is an identity governance solution that helps ensure that the right people have the right access to the right resources at the right time by automating access requests, assignments, and reviews through identity lifecycle management.

6. Microsoft Entra ID Protection helps organizations detect, investigate, and remediate identity-based risks. These identity-based risks can be further fed into tools like Conditional Access to make access decisions or fed back to a security information and event management (SIEM) tool for further investigation and correlation.

7. Microsoft Entra Verified ID is a credential verification service based on open decentralized identities (DID) standards. This product is designed for identity verification and management, ensuring that users' identities are securely verified. It supports scenarios like verifying workplace credentials on LinkedIn.

8. Microsoft Entra External ID: This product focuses on managing external identities, such as customers, partners, and other collaborators who are not part of the internal workforce. It allows organizations to securely manage and authenticate these external users, providing features like custom-branded sign-up experiences, self-service registration flows, and user management.

9. Microsoft Entra Permissions Management: This product deals with managing permissions and access controls across various systems and applications, ensuring that users have the appropriate level of access. It enables organizations to detect, automatically right-size, and continuously monitor unused and excessive permissions across Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

10. Microsoft Entra Workload ID: This product helps apps, containers and services securely access cloud resources, providing identity and access management for workload.