Microsoft has been on a roll lately when it comes to bundling a group of products into a brand new suite (see the ever-expanding Microsoft Defender family, life management suite Microsoft Priva or the Microsoft Purview compliance and governance mark). The Redmond firm did it again on Tuesday with the launch of a suite of identity and access products, dubbed “Microsoft Entra”.
According to Microsoft, digital access management is not straightforward because it is impossible for organizations to plan in advance for all of the access scenarios that may arise between an organization and its third-party vendors, who manage devices outside the corporate security perimeter. This is where Entra comes in.
Microsoft Entra includes all of Microsoft’s identity and access products: Azure Active Directory, Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), and Decentralized Identity. Azure AD handles everything from conditional access to passwordless authentication, and Azure AD External Identities, which handles B-to-B and B-to-C (business to consumer) connections, is also part of Entra. The CIEM element of all of this is the rebranded CloudKnox authorization technology. Microsoft acquired CloudKnox Security in 2021. The Verified Identity feature began in incubation form about five years ago and debuted as a public preview of Azure AD Verifiable Credentials.
Immediate availability
Entra is designed to provide identity and access management, cloud infrastructure management, and identity verification. It will work on-premises, on Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and on Microsoft and third-party apps, websites, and devices. “With the rise of Zero Trust, there’s a need to make it easier to connect partners, channels, and others in a multicloud environment,” said Alex Simons, Microsoft Corporate PM Vice President, Identity and Network Access.
“Identity has to be at the center of it all and not just to verify people, but also devices, the Internet of Things and the whole virtual supply chain,” he said. As for the name adopted by this new offer, Alex Simons explains it because it suggests “a gateway to a new business world”.
Microsoft is making Entra, and a new admin portal associated with it, available today. In terms of pricing, customers who want Entra will continue to pay per user per month for Azure AD, per active user per month for external identities, and per resource for authorizations, says Alex Simons. “Verified ID is part of Azure AD’s core paid platform, but a set of paid services that will work on top of it will be added at some point in the future. »
Source: ZDNet.com