Identity Foundations with Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Entra

In today’s rapidly changing digital landscape, businesses need to embrace cloud technology to remain competitive. Microsoft Azure provides a powerful suite of cloud services, enabling organizations to achieve scalability, agility, and cost-effectiveness. However, adopting Azure can be a daunting task, with a wide range of tools and services to navigate.

This book aims to simplify the process by providing a comprehensive guide to the most essential Azure topics, including managing access to resources, mitigating security threats with Microsoft Sentinel, understanding data solutions, and migrating to the cloud. With a focus on practical applications and real-world scenarios, this book also covers end-to-end observability, working with containers, networking, security principals, governance, building solutions with the Bicep language, and using Azure Pipelines for continuous integration and deployment. The book also includes tips from the field, sharing best practices and common pitfalls to avoid. By the end of this book, readers will have a solid foundation in Azure technologies and be well equipped to implement cloud solutions that drive their organization’s success.

As the modern IT landscape continues to evolve, so does the importance of effective identity and access management (IAM) solutions. Authentication and authorization, engaging and collaborating with employees, partners, and customers, and the significance of digital identities are just a few critical concepts that must be considered by organizations to maintain secure and efficient operations.

Azure Active Directory (AD), a cloud-based identity management service, is an integral component of Microsoft Entra. Microsoft Entra, a powerful identity-driven security tool, offers a comprehensive perspective on IAM in diverse environments. This chapter will delve into the importance of IAM in contemporary organizations, emphasizing the pivotal role of solutions such as Azure AD and Microsoft Entra in bolstering security measures.

In this chapter, we’ll cover the following main topics:

• Protecting users’ identities and securing the value chain – the importance of IAM in decentralized organizations
• Authentication and authorization in Azure
• Engaging and collaborating with employees, partners, and customers
• The significance of digital identities in the modern IT landscape
• Securing cloud-based workloads with Microsoft Entra’s identity-based access control

Let’s get started!