Last year, we were introduced to the Microsoft Entra product family, offering a vision for securing millions of connections that happen every second between people, machines, apps, and devices that access and share data.
To help organisations protect their ever-expanding digital estates, Microsoft has been designing the newest innovation beyond managing directories and authenticating users, to securing and governing access for any identity to any app or resource. Following this, we’re excited to announce the next milestone of enabling easy-to-secure access with two new products: Microsoft Entra Internet Access and Microsoft Entra Private Access.
Microsoft Entra Internet Access
Microsoft Entra Private Access
Microsoft Entra Security Service Edge (SSE)
Introduction
Protecting our data and access to it is critical. As technology demands increase, cyberattacks are becoming more frequent and sophisticated, affecting organisations of all sizes, in every industry, across the globe. In the last 12 months, Microsoft reported an average of more than 4,000 password attacks per second, an almost 3x increase from the 1,287 attacks seen the previous year. Attacks are becoming far more advanced, including ones that manage to evade critical defences, such as multi-factor authentication, to steal access tokens, impersonate a rightful user, and gain access to essential data.
Secure access to any app or resource, from anywhere
Flexible work environments leading to the increase in cloud workloads are straining traditional corporate networks and legacy network security approaches. Using VPNs to backhaul traffic to the legacy network security stack weakens security posture and damages the user experience while using siloed solutions and access policies leaves security gaps.
Microsoft Entra Internet Access is an identity-centric Secure Web Gateway that protects access to the internet, software as a service (SaaS), and Microsoft 365 apps and resources. It extends Conditional Access policies with network conditions to protect against malicious internet traffic and other threats from the open internet. For Microsoft 365 environments, it enables best-in-class security and visibility, along with faster and more seamless access to Microsoft 365 apps, so you can boost productivity for any user, anywhere. Microsoft 365 scenarios in Microsoft Entra Internet Access are in preview today, and you can sign up for the preview of capabilities for all internet traffic and SaaS apps and resources that will be available later this year.
Microsoft Entra Private Access is an identity-centric Zero Trust Network Access that secures access to private apps and resources. Now any user, wherever they are, can quickly and easily connect to private apps—across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, private networks, and data centres—from any device and any network. Now in preview, Microsoft Entra Private Access reduces operational complexity and cost by replacing legacy VPNs and offers more granular security. You can apply Conditional Access to individual applications, and enforce multifactor authentication, device compliance, and other controls to any legacy application without changing those applications.
Combining, Internet Access and Private Access, with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, SaaS security-focused cloud access security broker, comprise Microsoft’s Security Service Edge (SSE) solution. Microsoft continues to evolve their SSE solution as an open platform that delivers the flexibility of choice between solutions from Microsoft and Partners.
Microsoft Azure Active Directory is becoming Microsoft Entra ID
To simplify their product naming and unify our product family, Microsoft is changing the name of Azure AD to Microsoft Entra ID. Capabilities and licensing plans, sign-in URLs, and APIs remain unchanged, and all existing deployments, configurations, and integrations will continue to work as before. Starting today, you’ll see notifications in the administrator portal, on our websites, in documentation, and in other places where you may interact with Azure AD. This will be completed by the end of 2023. No action is needed from customers!
The latest innovations
- Prevent identity takeover in real-time: Instead of reactively revoking access based on stale data, ID Protection uses the power of Advanced Machine Learning to identify sign-in anomalies and irregular user behaviour and then block, challenge, or limit access in real-time. You will have access to a new dashboard that demonstrates the impact of the identity protections that organisations deploy with a comprehensive snapshot of prevented identity attacks and the most common attack patterns.
- Automate access governance: ID Governance automates the employee identity lifecycle to reduce manual work for IT and provides machine learning-based insights about identities and app entitlements. Because it’s cloud-delivered, it scales to complex cloud and hybrid environments, unlike traditional on-premises identity governance point solutions. It supports cloud and on-premises apps from any provider, as well as custom-built apps hosted in the public cloud or on-premises.
- Personalise and secure access to any application: As announced at Microsoft Build 2023, new developer-centric capabilities in Microsoft Entra External ID are now in preview. External ID is an integrated identity solution for external users, including customers, patients, citizens, guests, partners, and suppliers. It offers rich customisation options, Conditional Access, identity protection, and support for social identity providers.
- Simplify identity verification with Microsoft Entra Verified ID: Microsoft Entra Verified ID is already transforming organisations around the world, by reinventing business processes such as employee onboarding to become simpler and more secure.
Conclusion
Microsoft is committed to building a more secure world for all and making life harder for threat actors, easier for admins, and more secure for every user. The latest announcements from the Entra Product Family demonstrate how Microsoft is constantly evolving to protect its users.
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, we are here to assist organisations with utilising Microsoft Entra and any other products to provide the strongest security solutions with a flexible and agile model that can confidently make real-time access decisions.
If you'd like to know more, get in touch with our team today
