The new Microsoft Entra family announced by the tech major includes Microsoft Azure Active Directory along with two new product categories, namely cloud infrastructure entitlement management and decentralised identity
Microsoft Entra brings together all the identity and access capabilities of Microsoft. (Credit: efes from Pixabay)
Microsoft has bundled all its identity and access capabilities into a new product family called Microsoft Entra with an aim to enable secure access to a connected world.
The new family includes Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) along with two new product categories, namely cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) and decentralised identity.
Microsoft identity corporate vice president Joy Chik and Microsoft security, compliance, identity, and management corporate vice president Vasu Jakkal, in a blog, wrote: “Behind the scenes of all this innovation, millions and millions of connections happen every second between people, machines, apps, and devices so that they can share and access data.
“These interactions create exciting opportunities for how we engage with technology and with each other—but they also create an ever-expanding attack surface with more and more vulnerabilities for people and data that need to be addressed.”
Microsoft said that the Entra family products will help in giving secure access to everything for everyone, by offering management of identity and access, verification of identity, and cloud infrastructure entitlement management.
Microsoft Azure AD brings capabilities like conditional access and passwordless authentication.
Microsoft said that Azure AD External Identities will continue to be its identity solution for partners and customers under the Microsoft Entra family.
According to the company, following its acquisition of CloudKnox Security in 2021, it is now the first major cloud provider to provide a CIEM solution.
Dubbed Microsoft Entra Permissions Management, the solution is said to give full visibility into permissions for all identities for both user and workload, actions, and resources in multi-cloud infrastructures.
The CIEM solution is designed to help in detecting, right-size, and monitoring unused and excessive permissions. It is also capable of mitigating the risk of data breaches by enforcing the principle of least privilege in Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services.
For verification of identity, Microsoft has announced a new product offering called Microsoft Entra Verified ID. Based on decentralised identity standards, the new product lets individuals and organisations in deciding what details they share, when they share, with whom they share, and when required, take them back.
Last month, Microsoft launched a new service category called Microsoft Security Experts to assist organisations in achieving more secure, compliant, and productive outcomes.