Microsoft Entra - Microsoft's New Identity and Access Solutions

The products in the Entra family will help provide secure access to everything for everyone, by providing identity and access management, cloud infrastructure entitlement management, and identity verification.

According to Microsoft, Technology has transformed our lives in amazing ways, and the use of tech in our life also raises security concerns. It is important—and challenging—for organizations to address the risks as they advance their digital initiatives. They need to remove barriers to innovation, without the fear of being compromised. They need to instill trust, not only in their digital experiences and services, but in every digital interaction that powers them—every point of access between people, machines, microservices, and things.

Entra is designed to provide identity and access management, cloud-infrastructure management, and identity verification. It will work on-premises, across Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and across Microsoft and third-party apps, websites, and devices.

Microsoft Entra will verify all types of identities and secure, manage, and govern their access to any resource. The new Microsoft Entra product family will:

• Protect access to any app or resource for any user.
• Secure and verify every identity across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
• Discover and govern permissions in multi-cloud environments.
• Simplify the user experience with real-time intelligent access decisions.

This is an important step towards delivering a comprehensive set of products for identity and access needs, and we’ll continue to expand the Microsoft Entra, product family.

Microsoft acquired CloudKnox Security in 2021, and with that, it is the first major cloud provider to offer a CIEM solution: 

1. Microsoft Entra Permissions Management  — It provides comprehensive visibility into permissions for all identities (both user and workload), actions, and resources across multi-cloud 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 Azure AD, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform. Microsoft Entra Permissions Management will be a standalone offering generally available worldwide this July 2022 and will be also integrated within the Microsoft Defender for Cloud dashboard, extending Defender for Cloud’s protection with CIEM.
2. Workload Identity Management —  With the preview of this customers can assign and secure identities for any app or service hosted in Azure AD by extending the reach of access control and risk detection capabilities.