The Total Economic Impact™ study of the Microsoft Entra Suite

To quantify the Suite’s impact, Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study of Microsoft Entra Suite. Forrester interviewed four decision-makers and surveyed 119 respondents to form a composite reflecting a global enterprise with 85,000 users and USD28,000,000,000 in annual revenue. Forrester found that with the Microsoft Entra Suite, this composite organization experienced USD14,400,000 in benefits over three years, with a net present value of USD8,200,000 and a 131% return on investment (ROI)—driven by faster onboarding, reduced IT overhead, and stronger security.

This demonstrated value is what drives our continued focus across Microsoft Entra—ensuring organizations can keep pace with evolving security needs and maximize their operational efficiency. The momentum behind these results is fueling the next wave of Microsoft Entra innovation, as mentioned later in this blog and which will be highlighted this week at the Microsoft Entra Suite Summer Camp!

Let’s take a closer look at the findings from The Total Economic Impact™ of the Microsoft Entra Suite, and how organizations are realizing these benefits across four key pillars.

Unify identity and network access with a single policy engine

Organizations today often face inconsistent access policies and security gaps, as different teams configure and enforce policies using disconnected tools, leading to conflicting rules, gaps in protection, and poor coordination. Microsoft Entra Suite empowers organizations to converge access policies, using Conditional Access as a unified policy engine across identities, endpoints, apps, and networks.

With the Microsoft Entra Suite, Forrester found that the composite organization was able to reduce identity-related risk exposure by 30% by enforcing consistent Conditional Access policies and leveraging built-in identity protection, resulting in a three-year, risk-adjusted present value of USD535,000 in security savings.

We went from five engineers managing identity and access management tools to just one. Microsoft Entra Suite unified our stack and freed up resources for higher-value work.

—Chief Financial Officer and Vice President of Strategy in the technology industry

Automate governance and enforce least privilege at scale

As organizations manage more identities and resources, manual and disconnected processes often result in permission creep and increased risk, with threat actors exploiting abandoned or overprivileged accounts to access sensitive resources. It’s critical that organizations ensure only the right identities have access to the right apps and resources at the right time.

Forrester estimates that with the Microsoft Entra Suite, the composite organization reduced ongoing user management time by 80% by automated governance and lifecycle workflows, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted present value of USD4,600,000 in IT time savings.

Onboarding used to take hours. Now it’s under 30 minutes. That’s a massive time savings across thousands of users.

—Head of Software and IT in the technology industry

Improve user experiences

Delivering a seamless and secure experience to all employees—regardless of where they work or what resources they need—remains a challenge, especially when outdated and poorly integrated security tools create friction and inefficiency. By implementing risk-based conditional access and extending self-services password reset and passwordless authentication to all apps and resources, organizations not only freed up IT resources and improved productivity, but also delivered a more streamlined and satisfying user experience for their workforce. Forrester estimates that the composite organization decreased the number of password reset help desk tickets by 90%, reducing annual tickets from 80,000 to just 8,000 per year. This dramatic reduction yielded a three-year, risk-adjusted present value of USD2,600,000 in avoided costs, making it easier for employees to get work done securely and efficiently.

With [Microsoft] Entra Suite, we cut onboarding time by 80%, reduced help desk tickets by 90%, and strengthened security—all while improving user experience.

—Director of identity and access management in the IT services industry

Modernize your security by retiring legacy tools

Legacy security solutions often fail to scale for cloud-first, AI-first environments and can be expensive to maintain, weakening both security posture and operational efficiency. The Microsoft Entra Suite enables organizations to reduce their attack surface and protect against identity- and network-based attacks by retiring legacy tools such as traditional firewalls and VPNs. Forrester estimates that customers modernizing their identity and network access security reduced VPN license usage by 60 percent, resulting in estimated savings of USD680,000 over three years.

We eliminated most of our VPN licenses after rolling out Microsoft Entra Private Access. It’s more secure and far more cost-effective.

—Chief Information Security Officer in the security services industry

Read the full Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study to see how Microsoft Entra Suite helped organizations reduce risk, streamline operations, and modernize access.

Alongside these results, we’re excited to announce several new innovations now in public preview across Microsoft Entra including:

• Group source of authority transfer: Manage on-premises active directory groups in the cloud with dynamic, policy-driven governance.
• Shadow AI and IT visibility: Gain visibility into all software as a service and AI applications accessed by users, derived from real-time network activity monitoring.
• Threat intelligence filtering: Safeguard users from accessing malicious online destinations by leveraging real-time threat data sourced from Microsoft first-party feeds and more than 40 third-party feeds.
• Netskope One Advanced Security Service Edge integration*: Get advanced threat protection and unified management against malware, zero-day threats, and data leaks.

Want to learn more about these new features? Join us at the Microsoft Entra Suite Summer Camp this week to see new demos in action and get your questions answered by our product experts!

Learn more

Learn more about the Microsoft Entra Suite and Microsoft Identity and Network Access.

Learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

*Licensed separately from the Microsoft Entra Suite

The post Microsoft Entra Suite delivers 131% ROI by unifying identity and network access appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

In today’s interconnected world, there’s virtually no limit to what technology can help us achieve. Millions of connections happen every moment between people, machines, apps, and devices. Digital connectivity fuels new possibilities for us in business, helps us make positive changes in the way we live and work, and enables us to communicate without boundaries with almost anyone on the planet.

Expanding the ways we use digital technology, however, also causes attack surfaces to sprawl—making our identities, networks, and data more vulnerable. Seeing the mounting security challenges organizations are facing inspired us to think differently and to ask: What could people achieve if we had trust in every digital experience and interaction?

Last year, we introduced you to Microsoft Entra, a comprehensive family of identity and access solutions. Soon, we will be expanding Microsoft Entra to include even more products and capabilities to strengthen your defenses.

We hope you will join us on July 11, 2023, as we introduce the next stage of our vision at Reimagine secure access with Microsoft Entra. Register for this digital event to hear from Microsoft Security leaders about the latest innovations and current best practices in identity and access. You’ll hear announcements about new products and capabilities, see demonstrations, and get insights about the future of identity and access.

Reimagine secure access with Microsoft Entra

Attend the digital event to hear about the latest identity and access innovations.

Register today

Discover how Microsoft Entra is expanding to meet evolving security challenges

It can be almost impossible for organizations to anticipate all the access scenarios and attack vectors they need to protect against. That’s why it’s critical that organizations address the risks that come with growing their footprint in a limitless digital landscape.

In uniting all our identity and access capabilities as Microsoft Entra, our vision has been to create a trust fabric that can serve organizations across their entire digital ecosystem—and continue to expand our products to protect against all the scenarios organizations are facing. Envisioning strong identity protection as a cohesive, interlocking trust fabric that encompasses every digital interaction is a critical shift that organizations need to make in order to remain protected, now and in the future.

Our mission with Microsoft Security is to empower every organization to innovate fearlessly, enabling them to secure any point of access, wherever it may be. We want to make unauthorized access impossible for bad actors, and life easier for security professionals. But we are equally committed to making our solutions flexible and agile, so access is seamless for every user.

At the Microsoft Entra digital event, Joy Chik, President, Identity and Network Access at Microsoft, will talk about how to reinforce the trust fabric around all your digital interactions—while keeping your users’ experience simple—with new products from Microsoft Entra. She’ll be joined by experts from her team to share product demos and take a deep dive into some of the newest Microsoft Entra capabilities.

Get real-world insights from identity and access experts

To start the event, join Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President, Security, Compliance, Identity, and Management at Microsoft, as she discusses the Microsoft approach to comprehensive security. She’ll talk about how identity is now—more than ever—an organization’s first line of defense, and how we’re evolving identity to prepare us for future challenges.

Joy Chik will also give a keynote announcing groundbreaking innovations in the Microsoft Entra family, explaining how they take us a step forward in our mission to make it easy to secure access to any app or resource for every employee, customer, partner, and digital entity.

There will also be a series of deep dives where you’ll hear insights into identity and access trends, plus best practices on how to be more secure, efficient, and resilient in the face of identity-based threats and risks. You’ll learn how to think about secure access in a holistic way with Sinead O’Donovan, Vice President, Program Management; take a deep dive into identity innovations with Alex Weinert, Vice President, Identity Security; Sarah Scott, Principal Product Manager; Kristina Smith, Principal Product Manager; Sri Ponnada, Product Manager II; Avni Rambhia Principal Product Manager; and Ankur Patel, Partner Product Manager; and find out what’s happening next with Microsoft Azure Active Directory with me, Irina Nechaeva, General Manager, Identity and Network Access.

To end this event, you will explore the real-world applications of establishing an identity trust fabric through a panel discussion between me and experts Alex Simons, Corporate Vice President of Product Management, Identity and Network Access, Bret Arsenault, Corporate Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Microsoft, and David Holmes, Senior Analyst at Forrester. You’ll hear about industry shifts and trends, plus what they’ve learned from customers and how those experiences are helping us shape Microsoft Entra.

Join us at the Microsoft Entra digital event

We hope you’ll attend Reimagine secure access with Microsoft Entra to explore how to secure access for any identity to any resource in our connected world—and to be among the first to hear news about the latest identity and access innovations.

Through engaging conversations and demonstrations, you’ll learn how to optimize your tech stack, simplify your users’ experience, and prepare for whatever the digital future might bring. You’ll also have the benefit of seeing new Microsoft Entra products in action, and getting your questions answered by experts during the live Q&A session.

Learn more about Microsoft Entra.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and Twitter (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

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