In a connected world heavily invested in digital access, Microsoft Entra has emerged. Inspired by entry-ways and business portals, Entra aims to limit attack surfaces and reduce operational risks in hyper-connected environments. This new family of products encompasses all of Microsoft’s identity and access capabilities. Through the reimagining of direct identity and accessibility controls, the Entra suite attempts to foster digital trust through cloud infrastructure entitlement and identity verification.
Why Entra is important
As communication accelerates and networks proliferate around the world, the way we work and play is changing before our eyes. Online interactions create exciting opportunities for engagement and value creation, but they also lead to unwanted levels of exposure.
Entra is Microsoft’s latest attempt to address and manage this risk without compromising the user experience. Entra is about managing pathways to help businesses move forward with confidence. While this family of products is concerned with security and control, it aims to highlight accessibility above restrictive access.
The critical components of Entra
Microsoft Entra is a three-staged software collection designed to function as a single entity. According to Microsoft, it will help organizations to manage the accessibility requirements of any online application or resource. A range of technologies will be working under the hood to help Entra discover and manage permissions within multicloud environments.
Digital security is not a simple task, with Entra merging three core components as one. It includes the existing Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), along with two new product categories. The recently launched Permissions Management is based on Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), and a new decentralized identity product called Verified ID will be ready in August.
Entra includes the following core components:
- Azure AD is a comprehensive identity as a service (IDaaS) solution that deals with all aspects of identity, access management, and security. Azure AD manages everything from conditional access to passwordless authentication and Azure AD External Identities. As part of Entra, it will also manage B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) connections.
- Permissions Management is a multicloud infrastructure entitlement management solution. This arm of the Entra family is based on rebranded CloudKnox permission technology. Permissions Management offers visibility into permissions, actions, and resources. It helps to mitigate the risk of data breaches in Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform.
- The third part of Entra is a new decentralized identity product called Verified ID. This new service gives greater controls to security teams, who will be able to verify the credentials of users and organizations at any time and place. Customers will be able to create and share verifiable credentials across diverse services and link things like identity, proof of education, and employment.