Microsoft Entra – Digital Identity for a Multi-Cloud World

Microsoft Entra is their product suite for Digital Identity, which encapsulates and builds upon their Active Directory foundation and extends it further into a new world of Cloud and Decentralized Identity.

Entra offers a single solution to centrally manage your entire identity infrastructure.

Whether hybrid across your on-premises systems and the Microsoft Cloud, or across services spanning multiple clouds, like AWS, Google Cloud Platform and your favorite SaaS apps.

Joey Cruz, from the identity team at Microsoft, highlights the comprehensive capabilities of Microsoft Entra, including unified identity management, that spans beyond your Microsoft estate and beyond Azure Active Directory. He demonstrates new and unique capabilities for the day-to-day management of your users and workloads.

Verify your workplace on LinkedIn with Microsoft Entra Verified ID

Microsoft has embraced open standards and the evolution towards decentralized identity. Here they provide an introduction to Verifiable Credentials, and here describe their Decentralized Identity program, innovations that manifest through Entra Verified ID, a managed verifiable credentials service.

A flagship example of the service in action is how it enables verification of organizations on Linkedin, with members able to display this verification on their profile. With a few taps on their phone, members can get their digital employee ID from their organization and choose to share it on LinkedIn.

This knowledge base article explains how to set it up, and writing on Linkedin Oscar Rodriguez, Linkedin’s VP Product Management, describes how this sits within their overall verification program.

Azure AD B2c

For other organizations seeking to build similar functionality the key building block is Azure AD B2c.

As the documentation explains Azure AD B2c Azure provides business-to-customer identity as a service. Your customers use their preferred social, enterprise, or local account identities to get single sign-on access to your applications and APIs.

Azure AD B2C is a customer identity access management (CIAM) solution capable of supporting millions of users and billions of authentications per day. It takes care of the scaling and safety of the authentication platform, monitoring, and automatically handling threats like denial-of-service, password spray, or brute force attacks.

Identity-Enabled Applications

For developers looking to build applications that utilize these foundations Microsoft offers a range of best practice resources and case study examples.

This video walks through creating secure identities for apps using the Microsoft identity platform, and Halaa Menasy shares a two-part video tutorial on Identity for Multi-tenant SaaS applications. Dhruvin Shah provides a tutorial on how to configure Azure AD B2C Authentication for Power Pages.

In this case study Nitro explains how they are utilizing Microsoft Azure to enable their digital signing and identity solution world-wide. They also talk about how they tackle data residency challenges when working across countries.