Microsoft recently announced a new product family, Microsoft Entra, which encompasses all of Microsoft’s identity and access capabilities. Microsoft Entra includes Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) as well as two new product categories: a Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) solution called Microsoft Entra Permissions Management, and a decentralized identity product offering, Microsoft Entra Verified ID.
Joy Chik, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Identity, said, “We are seeing an increasing need for trust in a hyperconnected world. Through Microsoft Entra, we’re expanding our identity and access solutions so that they can serve as a trust fabric for the entire digital ecosystem—now and long into the future.”
Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President, Security, Compliance, Identity, and Management at Microsoft, added, “Microsoft Entra embodies our vision for what modern secure access should be. Identity should be an entryway into a world of new possibilities, not a blockade restricting access, creating friction, and holding back innovation. We want people to explore, to collaborate, to experiment—not because they are reckless, but because they are fearless.”
The digital estates of organizations are growing, changing, and becoming boundaryless. Security challenges have become much broader, and there is a need for broader solutions. Organizations need access decisions to be as granular as possible, and to automatically adapt based on real-time assessment of risk. Microsoft Entra is part of Microsoft’s expanded vision for identity and access. It will verify all types of identities and secure, manage, and govern their access to any resource, by:
- Protecting access to any app or resource for any user;
- Securing and verifying every identity across hybrid and multicloud environments;
- Discovering and governing permissions in multicloud environments; and
- Simplifying the user experience with real-time intelligent access decisions.
Reducing access risk across clouds
The adoption of multicloud has led to a massive increase in identities, permissions, and resources across public cloud platforms. Without visibility across cloud providers, or tools that provide a consistent experience, it is becoming incredibly challenging for identity and security teams to manage permissions and enforce the principle of least privilege across their entire digital estate.
Following the acquisition of CloudKnox Security last year, Microsoft is now the first major cloud provider to offer a CIEM solution—Microsoft Entra Permissions Management. It provides comprehensive visibility into permission for all identities (both user and workload), actions, and resources across multicloud infrastructures. Permissions Management helps detect, right-size, and monitor unused and excessive permissions, and mitigates the risk of data breaches by enforcing the principle of least privilege in Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform.
Microsoft Entra Permissions Management will be a standalone offering generally available worldwide in July 2022 and will be integrated within the Defender for Cloud dashboard, extending Microsoft Defender for Cloud’s protection into CIEM.
In addition, the preview of workload identity management in Microsoft Entra will allow Microsoft customers to assign and secure identities for any app or service hosted in Azure, by extending the reach of access control and risk detection capabilities.
Enabling secure digital interactions that respect privacy
Microsoft Entra Verified ID is a new product offering based on decentralized identity standards that implements the industry standards, making portable, self-owned identity possible.
Verified ID represents Microsoft’s commitment to an open, trustworthy, interoperable, and standards-based decentralized identity future for individuals and organizations. Instead of granting broad consent to countless apps and services and spreading identity data across numerous providers, Verified ID allows individuals and organizations to decide what information they share, when they share it, with whom they share it, and—when necessary—take it back.
Microsoft Entra Verified ID will be generally available in early August 2022.
Automating critical Identity Governance scenarios
IT and security teams are facing enormous challenges to provision new users and guest accounts and manage their access rights manually. Using Identity Governance in Azure AD, Microsoft’s existing cloud‑based identity and access management service, businesses can address these challenges with identity lifecycle management, which simplifies the processes for onboarding and offboarding users. Lifecycle workflows automate assigning and managing access rights, and monitoring and tracking access, as user attributes change.
Lifecycle workflows in Identity Governance will enter public preview in July 2022.
Visit the Microsoft Entra website to learn more about how Azure AD, Microsoft Entra Permissions Management, and Microsoft Entra Verified ID deliver secure access for our connected world.