What is Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and how it can help your business improve IT security

Are you sure that the confidential information of your business is reliably protected from unauthorized access? How many working hours does your IT department spend managing user accounts and user groups? And how many passwords do your employees have to access different company resources?

If you haven’t answered a single question with ‘We have Azure Active Directory, so it’s all set’, we recommend that you pay attention to this cloud-based identity and access management service.

Azure Active Directory is part of the Microsoft cloud services ecosystem and plays a key role in providing IT account security, convenience, and managing access to various company resources. Let’s see how true it is.

What is Azure Active Directory

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is a cloud-based identity and access management service provided by Microsoft for integration with various cloud and on-premises applications.

Azure Active Directory as part of Microsoft Entra is an enterprise identity service that provides single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and conditional access and protects users from 99.9% of cyber attacks. It eliminates the need to create and administer different user accounts for different systems. This is a kind of hub for all authentication and authorization requests: from Microsoft services to third-party applications.

7 benefits of using Azure AD for business

Using Azure Active Directory provides you with numerous benefits that make it easier to maintain your company’s IT security. Here are some of them:

• Single Sign-On (SSO).
  The basic idea behind SSO is to allow a user to log in once, and after that, their credentials will be used automatically to access other related resources. This makes the authentication process more convenient for users and reduces the risk of entering incorrect credentials. With Azure AD, you can set up single sign-on for users to cloud and on-premises resources, which simplifies the authentication process and improves the user experience.
• Easy integration with cloud and on-premises applications.
  Azure AD supports industry-standard protocols such as SAML 2.0, OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and WS-Federation, making it easy to integrate a variety of cloud and on-premises applications with Azure Active Directory.
• Identity protection: identification and authentication management.
  Azure AD provides a centralized mechanism for managing user identities. This allows you to request multi-factor authentication (MFA) while providing IT security and usability.
• Access control flexibility.
  Azure AD allows you to configure access policies for different resources based on roles and user groups. You can control which users have access to specific applications and resources and what actions they can perform.
• Synchronization with local directories.
  Azure AD allows you to synchronize user data, groups, and attributes from local directories, including Windows Server Active Directory. This simplifies user management and ensures data integrity.
• Identity protection and security.
  Azure AD has built-in security mechanisms such as threat detection, activity monitoring, and the use of access conditions to improve the security of user accounts.
• Integration with Microsoft ecosystem.
  Azure AD works seamlessly with other Microsoft products and services such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365, and more. This allows for uniform identification and access to these services.

Having outlined these benefits, we can conclude that using Azure AD helps create a secure and convenient environment for managing identity and access, which helps to increase the level of information security of the business, the efficiency and convenience of the work of users and IT administrators of the company.

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Who and for what tasks uses Azure Aсtive Directoty

Your employees can use Azure Active Directory to access their Microsoft 365 accounts such as Outlook email, SharePoint for document collaboration, and Teams for team communication and video conferencing.

With Azure AD, employees access the Azure portal, where they can manage various cloud services and resources such as virtual machines, databases, and more.

Azure AD integrates with thousands of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) programs such as Salesforce, Dropbox, Slack, Adobe Creative Cloud, and more. This means that your employees can use their Azure AD accounts for Single Sign-On to these programs without having to remember separate IDs and passwords for each program.

Overall, Azure AD makes it easy to manage access to various external resources and allows employees to conveniently and securely use them in their work.

A standalone service in Azure Active Directory is Azure Active Directory B2C. It is based on the same technology as Azure AD but is used for a different purpose: providing a convenient, secure and flexible identity system for external users to interact with various applications and services of the company. For example, developers can use Azure AD B2C to integrate authentication into mobile applications. Users will be able to sign in to apps from their existing account or by registering new ones.

Can Azure Active Directory be used for free?

Azure Active Directory is a free service available in all Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 subscriptions, and separately for Azure AD subscriptions. However, some advanced features and capabilities of Azure AD are available at an additional cost.
Usage and pricing for Azure Active Directory:

• Azure Active Directory Freе
  Companies can use Azure AD for free as part of a subscription to commercial cloud products, including Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Intune, Power Platform, and more.
• Microsoft 365
  It is also possible to use additional Azure AD features that are included in Office 365 E1, E3, E5, F1, and F32 for free.
• Azure Active Directory Premium P1
  Microsoft 365 E3 includes a 30-day free trial of Azure AD Premium P1.
  Price per user: $6 without VAT.
• Azure Active Directory Premium P2
  Microsoft 365 E5 includes a 30-day free trial of Azure AD Premium P2.
  Price per user: $9 without VAT.

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Azure Aсtive Directory (Azure AD) is becoming Microsoft Entra ID

When Microsoft introduced Microsoft Entra in May 2022, it included three products: Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Microsoft Entra Permissions Management, and Microsoft Entra Verified. The Microsoft Entra family was later extended with Microsoft Entra ID Governance and Microsoft Entra Workload.

To simplify product naming and unify the Microsoft Entra family, the company is changing the Azure AD name to Microsoft Entra ID. Licensing features and plans, login URLs, and APIs remain unchanged, and all existing deployments, configurations, and integrations will continue to work. All licensing plans and pricing for Azure AD and Microsoft 365 plans that include Azure AD remain the same.

All processes related to changing the name from Azure AD to Microsoft Entra ID are scheduled to be completed by the end of 2023. No action is required from you.

What can be done right now to improve your company’s IT security level?

Below are 2 ways we can help you minimize the risk of corporate data breaches and loss of employee passwords:

• Get a free company IT security assessment to learn about potential vulnerabilities in your business and get advice on how to improve your cybersecurity with the Zero Trust model.
• Schedule a consultation with us where we’ll answer your questions, identify your immediate needs, and tell you what tasks SMART business professionals can take on.

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