News

Microsoft Groups Identity Services Together Under New 'Microsoft Entra' Name

• By Kurt Mackie
• May 31, 2022

Microsoft's existing identity and access management services, which also includes a newly renamed offering, plus a coming decentralize item, will all be a part of the newly announced product name Microsoft Entra.

The Microsoft Entra product family has three segments that got the "Entra" name prefixed, namely:

• Microsoft Azure Active Directory (existing identity and access management service)
• Permissions Management (rename of Microsoft's acquisition of Cloud Knox Security, a "cloud infrastructure and entitlement management" service for detecting human and machine identities and activities) and
• Verified ID (a new decentralized identity product to come).

The stated rationale for this overall rebranding is that Microsoft views "identity as a trust fabric" for the "entire digital ecosystem" that organizations need to address. The product family is said to offer identity protections for apps and resources across "hybrid and multicloud environments" with simplified user experiences.

The Permissions Management segment of Microsoft Entra is said to enforce least-privilege access polices across various cloud services, including "Azure AD, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform." It'll be "generally available worldwide this July 2022," the announcement indicated. Microsoft is planning to integrate it with the Microsoft Defender for Cloud dashboard at some point, too.

The last segment of the Microsoft Entra product trio, Verified ID, is a new decentralized identity product that's essentially a rebrand of the Azure AD Verifiable Credentials service that previewed a year ago. The idea is to use blockchain electronic ledger and other technologies to create cryptographically secure digital attestations to a person's identity. It's analogous to a driver's license, passport or diploma, but individuals or organizations can revoke their IDs, if wanted. Verified ID is expected to be "generally available in early August 2022," the announcement indicated.

Microsoft also announced a couple of new previews that fall within the Microsoft Entra product family. There's a Workload Identities preview, originally announced in February, which is used to assign identities "to apps or services that need to access and communicate with other services." The Workload Identities preview is part of the Azure AD Identity Protection service.

There's also a coming Lifecycle Workflows offering that's part of the Azure Active Directory Identity Governance service. With Lifecycle Workflows, organizations can "automate assigning and managing access rights, and monitoring and tracking access, as user attributes change," according to the announcement. Lifecycle Workflows is expected to "enter public preview this July 2022."