Microsoft Entra update

At the end of May 2022 Microsoft introduced us to Microsoft Entra – a new product family encompassing all of Microsoft’s identity and access capabilities (https://bit.ly/3SEMXDA). There are three members of the family with Azure AD remaining the hero identity and access management product, alongside two new product categories: Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) and decentralized identity.

With the acquisition of CloudKnox Security in 2021, Microsoft now offers a CIEM solution as part of Entra called Microsoft Entra Permissions Management. This was made generally available in July 2022 (https://bit.ly/3PdAF2f) and is licensed as a standalone solution costing $125 per resource per year, where supported resources are compute resources, container clusters, serverless functions, and databases across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

The decentralized identity solution, Microsoft Entra Verified ID, was made generally available in August 2022 (https://bit.ly/3SQSyae) and is included with any Azure AD subscription, including Azure AD Free. If you’re new to this notion, then there’s a nice video explaining decentralized identity here: https://bit.ly/3paTuso.

In terms of learning more, if you’re a partner, then this Inspire session (https://bit.ly/3BfNea3) is a good introduction to Entra, and of course there’s the main product page here: https://bit.ly/3P7VGLK, with links to lots more product information.