Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

The main reason for implementing this solution was to help our customers to access internal or external resources seamlessly while allowing them to have full control over access and permissions. 

This enterprise identity service provided our customers with many security features such as single sign-on, multifactor authentication, and conditional access to guard against multiple cybersecurity attacks. 

Most of the clients have either Office 365 with hybrid solutions, a multi-cloud environment and they want to leverage Azure AD to manage access to those clouds or they have hybrid deployments with legacy apps on-premises and on the cloud as well. 

We have applied this solution to multiple organizations and it has helped them manage their environments efficiently. Moreover, it provided a high level of security and security features that are appreciated by most of our clients.

In hybrid scenarios, this is one of the best products you could have. It helped many of our customers to manage resources on-premises and in the cloud from a single dashboard. 

It helped our client to control permissions and review permissions for employees who have left the organization which kept them on-control over access and permissions granted to their employees.

The solution has many valuable aspects, including:

• Password policy enforcement
• Conditional access policies
• Self-service password reset for could users and on-premises
• Azure Active Directory Identity Protection
• Privileged Identity Management
• Multi-factor authentication 
• Passwordless authentication and sign-in
• Business to business and client to business support
• Support for SAML and OAuth

There are many more features that are very useful and can be used as part of the P2 package. There is no need to install any agent or tool to utilize those features except when extending advanced features to the on-premises active directory.

I believe the product is perfect, however, it could be improved if it could integrate with other clouds with fewer efforts and provide the same functionality it provides to Microsoft products.

Most of the features come with a P1 or P2 license. With the free version, you do not get much.

The objects in Azure AD are not managed in organizational units similar to what you get in the windows server active directory, which makes it more difficult to delegate administrative tasks

Azure AD does not support legacy authentication protocols, such as NTLM or Kerberos.

Azure AD is unaware of group policies. If you would like to use the same on-premises group policies, then you need to use the passthrough authentication method with your existing on-premises AD servers. This would compromise the high availability of the cloud and create a single point of failure.

I have been using this tool for more than five years.

A Very stable solution, I never saw the service down, unavailable, or anything like that.

The solution is highly scalable. There are no worries at all about the bandwidth or any other concerns. 

We've had a very positive experience and our clients are adopting it more as their sole identity and access management solution. 

Positive

We did use the SailPoint Identity Platform. There was no cloud solution at that time which is why we switched.

The ease of setup depends on the scenario and the use cases of your organization. 

We are a vendor team and most of the implementation for enterprise clients is done via us or similar vendors. 

The solution has a high ROI when adopted properly in your organization.

Make sure to check which features your organization requires. Find out if they are applicable to all users or just a bunch of them before deciding on buying a license.

We looked at many products, however, I do not want to mention the products' names. 

I use this solution as an identity platform for Microsoft Applications including Office 365. We have found that users have third-party applications for authentication using an integrated identity infrastructure.

The most valuable features of this solution are security, the conditional access feature, and multifactor authentication.

The conditional access policies allow us to restrict logins based on security parameters. It helps us to reduce attacks for a more secure environment.

Multifactor authentication is for a more secure way of authenticating our use.

All our on-premises identities are synchronized to Azure Active Directory. We have an advanced license that enables conditional access based on logins, and suspicious behaviors. 

Active Directory is able to determine if a particular user signing in from a trusted IP or if there are two different sign-ins from two different locations. It will flag this latter incident as a potential compromise of a user's account. 

In terms of security, it provides us with the features to alert us if there are any fraudulent attempts from a user identity perspective.

It provides access to our Azure infrastructure and allows us to assign roles and specific aspects to different subscriptions. It has several built-in roles that you can assign to individual users based on their job scope. It allows for granular provisioning.

With onboarding applications, you are able to register applications in Azure Active Directory, which allows you to use it as a portal for access as well.

Azure Active Directory enhances the user experience because they do not have various IDs for different applications. They are using one single on-premises ID to synchronize and they are able to access various different applications that are presented to them.

If you have a new application, you will export the application within Azure AD and we add access to those who need that application and you are able to use the corporate ID and password to access it.

Azure Active Directory is a good platform for us. We rely heavily on providing our users a good system and interface that we seldom have issues with.

The management interface has some areas that need improvement. It doesn't give you an overview similar to a dashboard view for Azure Active Directory. The view can be complicated. There are many different tabs and you have to drill down into each individual area to find additional information.

There are too many features available, more than we can use.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for three years.

It's quite stable. There are no issues with the stability.

The identity platform is quite robust.

It is very scalable. We have deployed it globally for approximately 10,000 users and experienced not many issues. In fact, we have not encountered any issues so far.

Generally, we don't have issues that require technical support. We have multiple domains within the Azure AD and we had an issue where SharePoint users were not able to access the domain.

We had a prompt response and were able to identify what the issue was. We were given specific tasks which led to resolving the issue.

I would rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Previously, we did not use another solution. Primarily it was an on-premises Active Directory that we synchronized to the cloud.

The initial setup was completed by a separate team.

We have five global administrators who are primarily responsible for providing access and assigning roles for all the various different groups and teams that have different subscriptions, and they will manage their subscriptions based on the roles that they are assigned.

In terms of deployment, Active Directory ensures that there is express route connectivity from an on-premises data center to Azure and ensures that there are sufficient redundancies in Azure Active Directory Connect Servers and Domain Controllers. 

We have seen a return on our investment. I would say that it is one of the key components of our identity solution

The pricing is very flexible. There are a few tiers of licensing, and it is a part of an enterprise contract.

It is bundled with other services and the pricing is quite reasonable.

We did not evaluate other solutions.

I would strongly recommend implementing Azure Active Directory.

For new organizations, it would be best to start implementing directly on the cloud, and for our existing organizations who have on-premises solutions, it would be seamless to synchronize the on-premises user with the cloud and use that. 

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

Azure Active Directory is similar to an on-premises access control system, but the service and data are hosted in the Azure cloud. Previously, everyone used to have Windows servers built as domain controllers for Active Directory to store their employee data. This assumed the role of a database for their employees.

With Azure Active Directory, which is in the cloud, you have the same functionality and there isn't much of a difference. The defining point is that you have access to online, cloud-based resources, such as Office 365.

In my company, as well as others, we had already implemented the on-premises Active Directory for our infrastructure. We leverage Azure Active Directory to synchronize the existing on-premises details to the cloud so that it creates an identity in Azure, which allows it to be used for other SaaS-based solutions.

This is the kind of solution that I feel you cannot run an organization without using.

Going forward, I expect that this solution will help to eliminate our on-premises infrastructure. Perhaps in the next few years, many companies will question their need for on-premises infrastructure and implement a purely cloud-based position. It will be a pay-as-you-go service.

Using this solution has affected our end-user experience because it enables and supports the Office 365 products that Azure provides. It is indirectly linked to all of the Office 365 solutions.

This is a feature-rich solution.

It offers features that improve our security posture such as multifactor authentication, which is the second layer of protection that is used when we log into the cloud.

The documentation, and the way that people are notified of updates, are things that can be improved. I'm a big fan of Microsoft products but the way they document is not that great.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for the past four years.

This solution was implemented approximately five years ago, before I joined the company.

We use this product on a daily basis. In fact, it is constantly being used and we don't have any problems with stability.

The scalability is good, and it is one of the reasons that we opted for a cloud solution.

We have more than 60,000 employees in the company and it scales very nicely. If more employees join the company then our usage will increase.

There are a variety of roles including administrators and different users. We have between 200 and 300 administrators.

Technical support from Microsoft is excellent.

We have had multiple issues where technical support has been needed. For example, the other day, we had a problem with synchronization. One of the user licenses was not synchronized properly and when we identified the root cause, it showed that the profile was not linked to the Active Directory Account. That was the main problem.

For us, it's constant improvement. Once a problem has been resolved, we document it accordingly so that it doesn't reoccur. Essentially, we don't want to have the same story again.

We also have Active Directory implemented on-premises, and it synchronizes with our cloud solution. The traditional Active Directory is what we used before this.

I was not responsible for the initial setup but my feeling is that it is not very straightforward. From a technical perspective, I expect that it is somewhat complex.

The deployment took approximately six weeks. We are a large company with more than 60,000 employees and I expect that for a smaller company, with perhaps 100 or 200 employees, it might take a day or two to complete.

One of the senior engineers in my organization was responsible for deployment. We also had assistance from Microsoft consultants. Between five and ten people were required for the deployment because it's a larger company.

There is no maintenance that needs to be done on our part. However, we have between 10 and 15 people who closely work on Azure Active Directory. 

Everyone uses a cloud solution to reduce the on-premises infrastructure cost and maintenance. In the coming years, there will be a lot of returns or a lot of cost-cutting that will happen.

The licensing is good and it is really easy to manage. We make sure that we only enable the licenses that are needed for the users, rather than enabling licenses in a blanket fashion. Basically, we only enable the features that are required for each of the users.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

Microsoft is a vendor that is always one step ahead.

The biggest lesson that I have learned is to read the documentation properly and thoroughly. Microsoft is great, but the documentation is sometimes updated and we aren't notified. This means that anytime you apply any solution, just make sure that you follow the proper guidance and always test before deployment.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We run in a hybrid model. We have our Active Directory on-premise directory services that we provide. We basically went to Azure so we could provide additional capabilities, like single sign-on and multi-factor authentication.

We are running in a hybrid environment. It is not completely cloud-native. We sync our on-premise directory to the cloud.

It definitely has improved our security posture, certainly from providing that second factor of authentication. It provides more visibility. We can see all facets of the business, e.g., when people are logging into our resources. This solution makes it highly visible to us.

It enhanced our end user experience quite a bit. Instead of the days of having to contact the service desk with challenges for choosing their password, users can go in and do it themselves locally, regardless of where they are in the world. This has certainly made it a better experience accessing their applications. Previously, a lot of times, they had to remember multiple usernames and passwords for different systems. This solution brings it all together, using a single sign-on experience. 

Is this specific to Azure? No. We have had other IdPs that gave us that same experience, but we have more apps that are integrated into Azure today from single sign-on than we had previously. Having that one handy "my apps" page for folks to go to as their one source for being able to gain access to all their apps is a much better experience from my point of view.

• Azure Application Proxy
• Single sign-on capabilities for SAML
• OAuth integrated applications
• The multi-factor authentication piece was desirable.
• Defender for Identity, as of recently.
• Some of the services, like Microsoft MCAS solution. 

These features offer additional layers of security, which is kind of what we were looking for. 

Some of the self-service password utilities certainly helped, given the scenario of the world today with COVID-19 and lockdowns. We certainly benefited from being able to say, "Have our users changed their password remotely." When they connect to the VPN, then sync them back up with the domain. So, that was very beneficial for us as well.

The thing that is a bit annoying is the inability to nest groups. Because we run an Azure hybrid model, we have nested groups on-premise which does not translate well. So, we have written some scripts to kind of work around that. This is a feature request that we have put in previously to be able to use a group that is nested in Active Directory on-premise and have it handled the same way in Azure. That is something that is actively being worked on. 

One of the other things that we felt could be improved upon is from an Application Proxy perspective. We have applications native to SSH, and we want to be able to do app proxy to TCP/IP. It sounds like that is actively on the roadmap now, which was amazing. It makes us very excited that it is coming, because we do have use cases with that as well.

I have been using it for a few years now.

The stability has been pretty rock solid. For the first time, we have seen some instability over the last month. I know there were some issues with Microsoft in terms of one of their stacks. That was something that they addressed pretty quickly though. We were appraised of the issues by our technical account manager, so we were in the know. We weren't left in the dark when something happened, and it was remediated pretty quickly.

We have about five to six folks whose main role is to manage identity, and that is my team at the company. However, we also have administrators all over the globe, handling service desk tickets, e.g., resetting passwords. There are about 30 or 40 people, if you include that level of things. However, from a global admin perspective, we probably have a total of eight people.

It is certainly scalable. Whether you are connecting to a local on-premise directory services organization, or if you are using B2B and B2C. This is part of the vision: At some point, leverage some of the B2B features that we have appointed to us in Azure, which we don't do today. This is certainly something that we are looking at internally as a potential for moving forward. 

We are managing 7,000 to 8,000 users within Azure AD.

This is room for growth.  

We are part of the DPP program. So, we talk to the identity folks at Microsoft on a weekly basis, who are amazing. It has been such a great experience with those folks.

The technical support that we get through the GTP program is amazing. Microsoft Premier Support is pretty good as well. We have called them, but typically we don't have the type of issues that we are calling all the time for. We have a pretty savvy team, and just being plugged into the GTP team has helped us understand new features which are coming out, whether we are part of an active preview or attending an evening where they are doing a webinar to introduce new features to us. The cool thing about that is you do have that line of sight if you need to ask questions or get technical answers. Between our technical account manager and our GTP partner, we do relatively well without having to open too many cases.

We had a different identity provider at one point in time. At the time that we were looking at identity providers, Microsoft really wasn't there from a technical perspective. They are there now, far surpassing some of the things that we have done in the past. So, it was a no-brainer for us. We are very much a Microsoft organization. Primarily, it is the operating system of choice, not only for endpoint service, but it was a pretty good deal to move over and leverage some of the licensing and whatnot for our end users.

From an IdP perspective, we had Okta for quite some time. We had some limitations with Okta that we were looking at Azure to handle. I got pulled in kind of mid-project. I am not really sure when the decision was made, or how it was made, but certainly cost was a factor. We were already licensed for a lot of what was needed to go with Azure, where we were paying Okta separate licensing fees. So, we saved money by switching from Okta to Azure.

The initial setup would have been complex if it had not been for being part of the GTP program. We have gotten a lot of value out of that program in terms of cross-training our team members, catching up on any new features that come out as well as any of the gotchas that the Microsoft team has seen. So, those have benefited us quite a bit.

The deployment probably took six to eight months. Standing up Azure and sinking your directory services, like creating a connector, takes minutes. We could stand that up in the day. What took time was taking all of the applications that we have throughout the environment, migrating them across and doing integrations with single sign-on. You need to have conversations with different application owners as well as potentially pulling in some vendors to do some of the configuration. There may be some apps which are not as straightforward as others, but we thought that the experience was pretty straightforward (to a point) where we can handle a lot of the work ourselves.

When we needed Microsoft, we were able to reach out, talk to them, and get the assistance that we needed. That was super beneficial to us.

There are a lot less calls to our service desk. For some of the traditional, "Hey, I need to reset my password," or "Hey, I'm locked out." So, we're seeing a lot of that self-service, gaining access to the different apps, and having it all be integrated with Azure will take away some of the headache. For example, "I don't know what my password is for GitHub," or, "I don't know what password is for Slack." We are like, "Well, it's the same password that you use every day." So, that has dropped call volume.

If you have a different IdP today, I would take a close look at what your licensing looks like, then reevaluate the licensing that you have with Microsoft 365, and see if you're covered for some of this other stuff. Folks sometimes don't realize that, "Oh, I'm licensed for that service in Azure." This becomes one of those situations where you have the "aha" moment, "Oh, I didn't know we can do that. Alright, let's go down this road." Then, they start to have conversations with Microsoft to see what they can gain. I would recommend that they work closely with their TAM, just to make sure that they are getting the right level of service. They may just not be aware of what is available to them.

We look to gain new features when updating licensing. Every time we go to negotiate an enterprise agreement, we are looking at:

• What are the benefits?
• What are we getting back from Microsoft?
  
  They are very good at working with us to get what we are looking for in terms of working on packaging for pricing.

We did not evaluate other options. The decision was pretty easy. When we initially looked at Okta years ago, Microsoft was also one of the folks that we looked at. Okta was a little more advanced than some of the gallery apps. Then, Microsoft made a huge play and added more gallery-type apps. That helped us quite a bit to move things along.

For others using Azure ID, take cookie online training. They are widely available, free, and give you a very good idea of what path you need to go to. So, if you want to take some professional training to become a guru, then you know what classes to go take and the fundamentals that you need to take before you get into that class. So, I highly recommend taking the video term.

I come from an Active Directory background for more than 20 years. Coming into Azure was actually great. We had somebody leave the company who was managing it, and they said, "Hey David, I know you are working for this other pocket of the business. How would you like to come back to the identity platform?" I said, "Absolutely." So, it was easier for me to come up to speed in several of the advanced areas of Azure, e.g., conditional access policies. We are starting down a zero trust methodology, which has been very exciting for me.

I would give it a solid eight (out of 10). It has a lot of the features that we are looking at. I don't think there are any tools out there that will give you that one magical wand with everything that you are looking for, but certainly this comes close. Microsoft has been working with us to help us through some of the new features and additions that are coming.

It's something that we use every day. We're migrating all of our customers over to it.

We use it for Office 365 and Azure services.

It's a cloud service. You do not depend on local identities. You can just synchronize the identities. It gives you the opportunity to use the security services that come with Office 365 and Azure. 

It does offer a single pane of glass for getting into all applications. However, we have some customers that have a hybrid environment and it depends on what applications and if the client wants them authenticated with Azure or not. In general, it's been positive for the final user experience.

We do have to manage identities on-premises in Azure and have one point of entry and the solution allows for that.

We use conditional access. That's a must for customers - to be able to verify users and devices. It helps with initiating a zero-trust policy. It's one of the main functionalities we really like. You can get granular with the policies in terms of access. 

We use conditional access in conjunction with Endpoint Manager. We also push Endpoint Manager as a solution to work with devices. That's also something that we try to push to the customers in any project. Most of the time, they go with it and like the idea of being merged with which are Endpoint Manager. Sometimes there are some customers, small customers, that maybe don't want to use that. Our position is to always use an endpoint manager.

It's helped out IT managers a lot in terms of the features on offer. I'm not sure of the exact amount of time that has been saved in general. I'm not involved in the day-to-day management from a customer's perspective. 

It's had a positive effect on the user experience. I'd rate the improvement nine out of ten. 

Support could be improved.

Okta has had more time in the business than Microsoft. I hope, in the roadmap, Microsoft eventually offers the same features as Okta. It will take some more time to mature. 

I've been using the solution for five years.

The solution is scalable. 

Customer support is good. However, it could be better sometimes. They do answer fast, however, the resolution itself is not fast. The first level of support will most likely have to move the issue to level two or three technicians and that process makes the resolution take longer.

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution. I deal strictly with Microsoft. I don't deal with any other companies. I'm dedicated to Microsoft. 

I was involved in the deployment process. It's easy for someone who's done it many times. 

In my department, we have ten to 15 colleagues that can handle these migrations or synchronizations. 

It's an easy product to maintain. 

We do have a customer that has Okta, and while we don't deal with it directly, we know what it does. We don't use it. Okta has specific features that are different from this product, however, it's not something we sell. For example, Microsoft can synchronize users from local to Azure, and not vice versa. Okta can do that, however. Also, the management lifecycle feature in Microsoft isn't as robust as Okta. 

Okta does have a lot of models, as does Microsoft. In both cases, depending on what you need, there would be a different license. 

There are not too many companies that have Okta in Spain, however, those that have would have many environments across AWS, Google, et cetera - not just Microsoft.

We're integrators. We don't use the solution ourselves. 

We do not use Permissions Management. I'm not sure if it is one functionality or a combination of several. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We use it because we have to onboard our user laptops to our Windows domain. Azure AD provides us with the Windows domain capability.

As an organization, we are going for ISO 27001 compliance. The only way to achieve much of that was to have Azure AD in place. Once Azure was in place, many things, like bringing all our laptops into the domain, and ensuring centralized policy deployment, were taken care of and that is where Azure AD has come in handy.

We use BitLocker for policy enforcement. And now, because of the Microsoft 365 Business Premium package, we get Intune as a part of it. That's very useful for us for setting policies and managing the systems. The biggest strength of Azure AD is Intune. As a user, I rarely go into Azure AD. I would rather go to Intune and work from there.

I've been using Azure Active Directory for the last few years. Since 2020, I've been using it extensively because, where I'm working, we're totally on Azure AD.

There is nothing to be worried about when it comes to stability. It's a cloud product.

We are not worried about scalability because it's a cloud system. It will run and they will scale it. They already have packages wherein you can scale it depending on how many users you have in your system.

Our usage of Azure AD will continue, going forward, as an organization. We are not going to pull back on it. It's only a question of what more we can extract out of it as we go along.

Technical support varies. The problem is that Microsoft has contracted out support to multiple organizations around the world. When you raise a ticket, you may or may not get support from someone in your country or region. That's "Part I". 

"Part II" is that when you get to a support agent, they go by the playbook. While they do a lot of R&D for us when we give them the problem in detail, and they actually find things out and come back to us, they're not willing to go beyond the established guidelines to try to troubleshoot. They will only do so if it becomes a pain-in-the-neck issue and multiple users are reporting that problem. For example I found an issue with Defender and I raised a ticket with the Defender team. That has now been pushed to some sort of a feature update, so things like that do happen.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. There is nothing very complicated about it.

The very basic setup of AD might take between 10 minutes and half an hour. Then, if you sit down and focus on the task, it takes about a couple of days to have all your nodes in place.

In our company, there is another person who is my immediate junior and who reports to me. We are the ones who deploy, use, and maintain the system.

We are using the version that comes with Microsoft 365 Business Premium.

Microsoft has a very weird way of licensing the product. With the standard on-prem edition, we can do a lot of regular, day-to-day maintenance, including creating policies and the like. We can't do that in Azure Active Directory. The Azure system is very basic in nature compared to what the server provides us.

There are add-on components and services, such as identity services, that we have to add to our Azure subscription. Only then can I actually say it's on par with the on-prem server edition.

Why should I pay for a component? It should be included in my subscription. I understand there may be an added fee, but don't remove an essential component. I am a career IT guy. When I start comparing my on-prem server against this cloud edition, I see that there are components missing. The money issue is secondary. Give me a solution that matches the Azure standard edition. They should ensure that whatever I have on my domain controller are the facilities that run here in Azure AD. For example, on the domain controller, if you are my user, I can let you create a 14-character or a 20-character password. I can't do that on Azure AD. To do that, I must get the Directory Services module, which costs me another $100 a month. Let that cost be added to the bill and let me create my configurations as and how I want. Why do they want to restrict me? It's a detrimental business practice.

Still, I say go for it. Don't worry about the pricing. Licensing, at the basic level, is sensible. But you should actively talk to your reseller about the needs of your organization. Costs will vary as you dig deeper into understanding what product or service you need. Independent of your geographic location, talk to a local Microsoft partner and understand the cost. Don't simply go online and order things. I would stress that to anybody in the world, whatever the size of their organization.

The pricing module is pretty straightforward for many of the products. They have a price for up to 300 users for many of the licensed products. Up to 300 users is not considered an enterprise business.

You may have knowledge about the product, but when you talk to somebody else you get a slightly different perspective. Exercise that principle. Talk to one or two vendors, but talk. Spend time on the call. Understand what you want. One person might give you an idea of how you can deploy with your existing products, while another guy might say those products have these weaknesses and these strengths.

From the organizational perspective, it's not the native Azure AD components that provide value to the customer, it's more the other components. If you're a Microsoft 365 Business Premium customer, you get Microsoft 365 Defender. Along with that package, you get something called Secure Score for your organization. The beauty of Secure Score is that it gives you something of a benchmark. It says X percentage of organizations have this particular level of security score and it tells you how you can upgrade your security. It may tell you to enable something or disable a feature. After about a day's time, during which the change percolates across the organization, your security posture goes up a notch. That's a very useful tool for any organization, whatever the size.

The end-user experience is better because we don't have to have so many components on board, compared to other solutions, to do something. For example, even though Defender is a limited version in some critical aspects, it still does its job pretty well. One major benefit of having it is that we can control the policies of Defender from the Intune portal or the Microsoft 365 Defender system because it's backed by Azure AD. Azure AD plays a kind of backend role. 

It doesn't play much of a front-end role wherein I can create a policy. If I have to create a GPO, I must get the Directory Services component. Without that, I cannot create a GPO the way I would with the ordinary service. That's a critical difference. And with Microsoft, as usual, until you go digging around, you'll never know about this. I raised support queries with Microsoft and followed up with the tech support, after which I was informed that until I have Directory Services I can't do anything. This kind of clarity is not provided to the customer. Microsoft's website is really weak when it comes to providing specific details.

I would tell any organization that doesn't have Azure Active Directory today not to spend money on setting up a server and a data center and infrastructure. Simply upgrade your Office subscription, because it eventually happens. The world is divided into two major parts: Microsoft users and Google users, and there may be some percentage that doesn't use either product. If you're using these products and looking at ISO compliance, simply upgrade to Microsoft 365 Business Premium. You'll get Azure AD and then you can go about the rest of your work.

Overall, I rate Azure AD at seven out of 10. There is a huge difference in the capabilities between the on-prem server and the Azure version.

Microsoft Authenticator is the tool provided to assure that we are using the Microsoft product in the correct way, from the Microsoft point of view.

It's two-factor authentication. I personally use several of them, from Google to Microsoft Authenticator to others. It's a solution that works.

The solution is stable. 

The product is easy to install and quick to deploy.

The solution is secure.

It offers good Microsoft integration capabilities. 

For the moment, I don't have any complaints. 

The pricing is okay, however, it could always be better in the future.

It is a stable, reliable product. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

In terms of scalability, we don't have complaints about this from the users of this kind of solution.

Several people in our company use the product. I am unsure of the exact number. 

When we have problems, we don't go to Microsoft; we complain internally to a group that is responsible for keeping this working. I can't speak to how Microsoft's support is. I've never directly interacted with them.

Positive

I also use Google Authenticator.

I need to use different services to log on. Microsoft promotes its own solutions. For my bank, for instance, I have a solution imposed by my bank. For Google, I have Google Authenticator. For Microsoft Plus. I have Microsoft Authenticator. For our VPN, we use FortiGate, the authenticator.

The installation is easy. You can do the installation on mobile phones and it can be installed on the web. It's not a problem.

The deployment is fast and only takes about two minutes. It's supposed to be done by the end-user.

I have done the implementation myself. I did not need the assistance of any integrators or consultants.

I don't pay a separate licensing fee. It's already included in the service we buy from Microsoft.

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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.