Microsoft is releasing Microsoft Entra, a new family of products that houses all of the company’s identity and access capabilities, including Azure Active Directory and two new product categories for cloud infrastructure entitlement management and decentralized identity.
The products combined in the new identity and access suite of products are designed to help organizations secure access “to everything for everyone” by providing identity and access management, cloud infrastructure entitlement management and identity verification.
In a blog penned by Joy Chik, corporate vice president of Microsoft Identity and Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president of security, compliance, identity and management, the two write that the Entra product family will protect access to any app or resource for any user, secure and verify identities across hybrid and multicloud environments, discover and govern permissions in multicloud environments and simplify the user experience with real-time intelligence access decisions.
While the Entra family is highlighted by Azure AD and its conditional access and passworldess authentication features, as well as External Identities for customers and partners, Entra also features Permissions Management and Verified ID.
Permissions Management is Entra’s cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) solution that provides visibility into permissions for all identities, actions and resources across multicloud permissions, per Microsoft. The solution can help detect, right-size and monitor unused and excessive permissions as well as enforce the principle of lease privilege in Azure AD, AWS and Google Cloud Platform.
Permissions Management, born out of Microsoft’s acquisition of CloudKnox Security last year, will be a standalone offering generally available in July, and will also be integrated into the Defender for Cloud dashboard, according to Microsoft.
As part of Entra, Microsoft also announced a new product, Entra Verified ID, a new tool that implements decentralized identity standards designed to give users and organizations more control over information sharing.
According to Microsoft, Verified ID, generally available in August, makes it more secure and easier to conduct business to-business and business-to-consumer transactions, and makes background checks faster and more reliable with the ability to digitally store and share education and certification credentials.
Also part of the Entra family of products is Identity Governance, a tool entering public preview in July that Microsoft says helps simplify the process of onboard and offboarding users with lifecycle workflows that automate assigning and managing access rights, as well as monitoring and tracking access as user attributes change.
“Microsoft Entra embodies our vision for what modern secure access should be. Identity should be an entryway into a world of new possibilities, not a blockade restricting access, creating friction, and holding back innovation,” Chik and Jakkal write in the blog. “We want people to explore, to collaborate, to experiment—not because they are reckless, but because they are fearless.”
The company adds that it plans to continue to expand the Microsoft Entra product family.
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