Microsoft commends the DoD for approaching Zero Trust as a mindset, not a capability or device that may be bought.¹ Zero Trust can’t be achieved by a single technology, but through tight integration between solutions across product categories. Deciphering how security products achieve Zero Trust based on marketing materials alone is a daunting task. IT leaders need to select the right tools. Security architects need to design integrated solutions. Implementers need to deploy, configure, and integrate tools to achieve the outcomes in each Zero Trust activity.

Today, we are excited to announce Zero Trust activity-level guidance for DoD Components and DIB partners implementing the DoD Zero Trust Strategy. To learn more, see Configure Microsoft cloud services for the DoD Zero Trust Strategy.

In this blog, we’ll review the DoD Zero Trust Strategy and discuss how our new guidance helps DoD Components and DIB partners implement Zero Trust. We’ll cover the Microsoft Zero Trust platform and relevant features for meeting DoD’s Zero Trust requirements, and close with real-world DoD Zero Trust deployments.

Microsoft supports the DoD’s Zero Trust Strategy

The DoD released its formal Zero Trust Strategy in October 2022.¹ The strategy is a security framework and mindset that set a path for achieving Zero Trust. The strategy outlines strategic goals for adopting culture, defending DoD Information Systems, accelerating technology implementation, and enabling Zero Trust.

The DoD Zero Trust Strategy includes seven pillars that represent protection areas for Zero Trust:

1. User
2. Device
3. Applications and workloads
4. Data
5. Network
6. Automation and orchestration
7. Visibility and analytics

In January 2023, the DoD published a capabilities-based execution roadmap for implementing Zero Trust.² The roadmap details 45 Zero Trust capabilities spanning the seven pillars. The execution roadmap details the Zero Trust activities DoD Components should perform to achieve each Zero Trust capability. There are 152 Zero Trust activities in total, divided into Target Level Zero Trust and Advanced Level Zero Trust phases with deadlines of 2027 and 2032, respectively.

The Zero Trust activity-level guidance we’re announcing in this blog continues Microsoft’s commitment to supporting DoD’s Zero Trust strategy.³ It serves as a reference for how DoD Components should implement Zero Trust activities using Microsoft cloud services. Microsoft product teams and security architects supporting DoD worked in close partnership to provide succinct, actionable guidance side-by-side with the DoD Zero Trust activity text and organized by product with linked references.

We scoped the guidance to features available today (including public preview) for Microsoft 365 DoD and Microsoft Azure Government customers. As the security landscape changes, Microsoft will continue innovating to meet the needs of federal and DoD customers.⁴ We’re excited to bring entirely new Zero Trust technologies like Microsoft Copilot for Security and Security Service Edge to United States Government clouds in the future.⁵

Look out for announcements in the Microsoft Security Blog and check Microsoft’s DoD Zero Trust documentation to see the latest guidance.

Microsoft’s Zero Trust platform

Microsoft is proud to be recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust Platform Providers, Q3 2023 report.⁶ The Microsoft Zero Trust platform is a modern security architecture that emphasizes proactive, integrated, and automated security measures. Microsoft 365 E5 combines best-in-class productivity apps with advanced security capabilities that span all seven pillars of the DoD Zero Trust Strategy.

“Single products/suites can be adopted to address multiple capabilities. Integrated vendor suites of products rather than individual components will assist in reducing cost and risk to the government.”

 —Department of Defense Zero Trust Reference Architecture Version 2.0⁷

Microsoft 365 is a comprehensive and extensible Zero Trust platform.⁸ It’s a hybrid cloud, multicloud, and multiplatform solution. Pre-integrated extended detection and response (XDR) services coupled with modern cloud-based device management, and a cloud-based identity and access management service, provide a direct and rapid modernization path for the DoD and DIB organizations.

Read on to learn about Microsoft cloud services that support the DoD Zero Trust Strategy.

Figure 1. Microsoft Zero Trust Architecture.

Microsoft Entra ID is an integrated multicloud identity and access management solution and identity provider. Microsoft Entra ID is tightly integrated with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR services to provide a comprehensive suite Zero Trust capabilities including strict identity verification, enforcing least privilege, and adaptive risk-based access control.

Microsoft Entra ID is built for cloud-scale, handling billions of authentications every day. It uses industry standard protocols and is designed for both Microsoft and non-Microsoft apps. Establishing Microsoft Entra ID as your organization’s Zero Trust identity provider lets you configure, enforce, and monitor adaptive Zero Trust access policies in a single location. Conditional Access is the Zero Trust authorization engine for Microsoft Entra ID. It enables dynamic, adaptive, fine-grained, risk-based, access policies for any workload.

Microsoft Entra ID is essential to the user pillar and has a role in all other pillars of the DoD Zero Trust Strategy.

Microsoft Intune is a multiplatform endpoint and application management suite for Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, iPadOS, and Android devices. Microsoft Intune configuration policies manage devices and applications. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint helps organizations prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to advanced threats on devices. Microsoft Intune and Defender for Endpoint work together to enforce security policies, assess device health, vulnerability exposure, risk level, and configuration compliance status. Conditional Access policies requiring a compliant device help achieve comply-to-connect  outcomes in the DoD Zero Trust Strategy.

Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint help achieve capabilities in the device pillar.

GitHub is a cloud-based platform where you can store, share, and work together with others to write code. GitHub Advanced Security includes features that help organizations improve and maintain code by providing code scanning, secret scanning, security checks, and dependency review throughout the deployment pipeline. Microsoft Entra Workload ID helps organizations use continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) with GitHub Actions.

GitHub and Azure DevOps are essential to the applications and workloads pillar.

Microsoft Purview is a range of solutions for unified data security, data governance, and risk and compliance management. Microsoft Purview Information Protection lets you define and label sensitive information types. Auto-labeling within Microsoft 365 clients ensure data is appropriately labeled and protected. Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention integrates with Microsoft 365 services and apps, and Microsoft Defender XDR components to detect and prevent data loss.

Microsoft Purview features align to the data pillar activities.

Azure networking services include a range of software-defined network resources that can be used to provide networking capabilities for connectivity, application protection, application delivery, and network monitoring. Azure networking resources like Microsoft Azure Firewall Premium, Azure DDoS Protection, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, Azure API Management, Azure Virtual Network, and Network Security Groups, all work together to provide routing, segmentation, and visibility into your network.

Azure networking services and network segmentation architectures are essential to the network pillar.

Microsoft Defender XDR is a unified pre- and post-breach enterprise defense suite that natively coordinates detection, prevention, investigation, and response actions. It correlates millions of signals across endpoints, identities, email, and applications to automatically disrupt attacks. Microsoft Defender XDR’s automated investigation and response and Microsoft Sentinel playbooks are used to complete security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) activities.

Microsoft Defender XDR plays a key role in automation and orchestration and visibility and analytics pillars.

Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-based security information and event management (SIEM) you deploy in Azure. Microsoft Sentinel operates at cloud scale to accelerate security response and save time by automating common tasks and streamlining investigations with incident insights. Built-in data connectors make it easy to ingest security logs from Microsoft 365, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Entra ID, Azure, non-Microsoft clouds, and on-premises infrastructure.

Microsoft Sentinel is essential to automation and orchestration and visibility and analytics pillars along with any activities requiring SIEM integration.

Real-world pilots and implementations

The DoD is embracing Zero Trust as a continuous modernization effort. Microsoft has partnered with DoD Components for several years, onboarding Microsoft 365 services, integrating apps with Microsoft Entra, migrating Azure workloads, managing devices with Microsoft Intune, and building security operations around Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Sentinel.

One such example is the United States Navy’s innovative Flank Speed program. The Navy’s large-scale deployment follows Zero Trust capabilities put forth in the DoD’s strategy. These capabilities include comply-to-connect, continuous authorization, least-privilege access, and data-centric security controls.⁹ To date, Flank Speed has onboarded more than 560,000 users and evaluated the effectiveness of its robust cybersecurity tools through Purple Team assessments.¹⁰

Another example is Army 365, the United States Army’s Microsoft 365 environment.¹¹ Army 365 has onboarded more than 1.4 million users and migrated petabytes of data.¹² The secure collaboration environment incorporates Zero Trust principles in a secure collaboration environment with identity and device protections and includes support for bring your own device (BYOD) through Azure Virtual Desktop.¹³

DoD Zero Trust Strategy and Roadmap

Learn how to configure Microsoft cloud services for the DoD Zero Trust Strategy.

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Embrace proactive security with Zero Trust.

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 X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹DoD Zero Trust strategy, DoD CIO Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office. October 2022.

²Zero Trust Capability Execution Roadmap, DoD CIO Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office. January 2023.

³Microsoft supports the DoD’s Zero Trust strategy, Steve Faehl. November 22, 2022.

⁴5 ways to secure identity and access for 2024, Joy Chik. January 10, 2024.

⁵Microsoft Entra Expands into Security Service Edge with Two New Offerings, Sinead O’Donovan. July 11, 2023.

⁶Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in the 2023 Zero Trust Platform Providers Wave™ report, Joy Chik. September 19, 2023.

⁷Department of Defense (DoD) Zero Trust Reference Architecture Version 2.0, Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), National Security Agency (NSA) Zero Trust Engineering Team. July 2022.

⁸How Microsoft is partnering with vendors to provide Zero Trust solutions, Vasu Jakkal. October 21, 2021.

⁹Flank Speed Has Paved the Way for Navy to Become ‘Leaders in Zero Trust Implementation,’ Says Acting CIO Jane Rathbun, Charles Lyons-Burt, GovCon Wire. June 2023.

¹⁰Flank Speed makes significant strides in DOD Zero Trust Activity alignment, Darren Turner, PEO Digital. December 2023.

¹¹Army launches upgraded collaboration platform; cybersecurity at the forefront, Alexandra Snyder. June 17, 2021.

¹²Cohesive teams drive NETCOM’s continuous improvement, Army 365 migration, Enrique Tamez Vasquez, NETCOM Public Affairs Office. March 2023.

¹³BYOD brings personal devices to the Army network, Army Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-6. February 2024.

The post New Microsoft guidance for the DoD Zero Trust Strategy appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Generative AI will empower individuals and organizations to increase productivity and accelerate their work, but these tools can also be susceptible to internal and external risk. Attackers are already using AI to launch, scale, and even automate new and sophisticated cyberattacks, all without writing a single line of code. Machine learning demands have increased as well, leading to an abundance of workload identities across corporate multicloud environments. This makes it more complex for identity and access professionals to secure, permission, and track a growing set of human and machine identities.

Adopting a comprehensive defense-in-depth strategy that spans identity, endpoint, and network can help your organization be better prepared for the opportunities and challenges we face in 2024 and beyond. To confidently secure identity and access at your organization, here are five areas worth prioritizing in the new year:

1. Empower your workforce with Microsoft Security Copilot.
2. Enforce least privilege access everywhere, including AI apps.
3. Get prepared for more sophisticated attacks.
4. Unify access policies across identity, endpoint, and network security.
5. Control identities and access for multicloud.

Our recommendations come from serving thousands of customers, collaborating with the industry, and continuously protecting the digital economy from a rapidly evolving threat landscape.

Microsoft Entra

Learn how unified multicloud identity and network access help you protect and verify identities, manage permissions, and enforce intelligent access policies, all in one place.

Explore Microsoft Entra

Priority 1: Empower your workforce with Microsoft Security Copilot

This year generative AI will become deeply infused into cybersecurity solutions and play a critical role in securing access. Identities, both human and machine, are multiplying at a faster rate than ever—as are identity-based attacks. Sifting through sign-in logs to investigate or remediate identity risks does not scale to the realities of cybersecurity talent shortages when there are more than 4,000 identity attacks per second.¹ To stay ahead of malicious actors, identity professionals need all the help they can get. Here’s where Microsoft Security Copilot can make a big difference at your organization and help cut through today’s noisy security landscape. Generative AI can meaningfully augment the talent and ingenuity of your identity experts with automations that work at machine-speed and intelligence.

Based on the latest Work Trend Index, business leaders are empowering workers with AI to increase productivity and help employees with repetitive and low value tasks.² Early adopters of Microsoft Security Copilot, our AI companion for cybersecurity teams, have seen a 44% increase in efficiency and 86% increase in quality of work.³ Identity teams can use natural language prompts in Copilot to reduce time spent on common tasks, such as troubleshooting sign-ins and minimizing gaps in identity lifecycle workflows. It can also strengthen and uplevel expertise in the team with more advanced capabilities like investigating users and sign-ins associated with security incidents while taking immediate corrective action. 

To get the most out of your AI investments, identity teams will need to build a consistent habit of using their AI companions. Once your workforce becomes comfortable using these tools, it is time to start building a company prompt library that outlines the specific queries commonly used for various company tasks, projects, and business processes. This will equip all current and future workers with an index of shortcuts that they can use to be productive immediately.

How to get started: Check out this Microsoft Learn training on the fundamentals of generative AI, and subscribe for updates on Microsoft Security Copilot to be the first to hear about new product innovations, the latest generative AI tips, and upcoming events.

Priority 2: Enforce least privilege access everywhere, including AI apps

One of the most common questions we hear is how to secure access to AI apps—especially those in corporate (sanctioned) and third-party (unsanctioned) environments. Insider risks like data leakage or spoilage can lead to tainted large language models, confidential data being shared in apps that are not monitored, or the creation of rogue user accounts that are easily compromised. The consequences of excessively permissioned users are especially damaging within sanctioned AI apps where users who are incorrectly permissioned can quickly gain access to and manipulate company data that was never meant for them.

Ultimately, organizations must secure their AI applications with the same identity and access governance rules they apply to the rest of their corporate resources. This can be done with an identity governance solution, which lets you define and roll out granular access policies for all your users and company resources, including the generative AI apps your organization decides to adopt. As a result, only the right people will have the right level of access to the right resources. The access lifecycle can be automated at scale through controls like identity verification, entitlement management, lifecycle workflows, access requests, reviews, and expirations. 

To enforce least privilege access, make sure that all sanctioned apps and services, including generative AI apps, are managed by your identity and access solution. Then, define or update your access policies with a tool like Microsoft Entra ID Governance that controls who, when, why, and how long users retain access to company resources. Use lifecycle workflows to automate user access policies so that any time a user’s status changes, they still maintain the correct level of access. Where applicable, extend custom governance rules and user experiences to any customer, vendor, contractor, or partner by integrating Microsoft Entra External ID, a customer identity and access management (CIAM) solution. For high-risk actions, require proof of identity in real-time using Microsoft Entra Verified ID. Microsoft Security Copilot also comes with built-in governance policies, tailored specifically for generative AI applications, to prevent misuse.

How to get started: Read the guide to securely govern AI and other business-critical applications in your environment. Make sure your governance strategy abides by least privilege access principles.

Priority 3: Get prepared for more sophisticated attacks

Not only are known attacks like password spray increasing in intensity, speed, and scale, but new attack techniques are being developed rapidly that pose a serious threat to unprepared teams. Multifactor authentication adds a layer of security, but cybercriminals can still find ways around it. More sophisticated attacks like token theft, cookie replay, and AI-powered phishing campaigns are also becoming more prevalent. Identity teams need to adapt to a new cyberthreat landscape where bad actors can automate the full lifecycle of a threat campaign—all without writing a single line of code.

To stay safe in today’s relentless identity threat landscape, we recommend taking a multi-layered approach. Start by implementing phishing-resistant multifactor authentication that is based on cryptography or biometrics such as Windows Hello, FIDO2 security keys, certificate-based authentication, and passkeys (both roaming and device-bound). These methods can help you combat more than 99% of identity attacks as well as advanced phishing and social engineering schemes.⁴ 

For sophisticated attacks like token theft and cookie replay, have in place a machine learning-powered identity protection tool and Secure Web Gateway (SWG) to detect a wide range of risk signals that flag unusual user behavior. Then use continuous access evaluation (CAE) with token protection features to respond to risk signals in real-time and block, challenge, limit, revoke, or allow user access. For new attacks like one-time password (OTP) bots that take advantage of multifactor authentication fatigue, educate employees about common social engineering tactics and use the Microsoft Authenticator app to suppress sign-in prompts when a multifactor authentication fatigue attack is detected. Finally, for high assurance scenarios, consider using verifiable credentials—digital identity claims from authoritative sources—to quickly verify an individual’s credentials and grant least privilege access with confidence. 

Customize your policies in the Microsoft Entra admin center to mandate strong, phishing resistant authentication for any scenario, including step up authentication with Microsoft Entra Verified ID. Make sure to implement an identity protection tool like Microsoft Entra ID Protection, which now has token protection capabilities, to detect and flag risky user signals that your risk-based CAE engine can actively respond to. Lastly, secure all internet traffic, including all software as a service (SaaS) apps, with Microsoft Entra Internet Access, an identity-centric SWG that shields users against malicious internet traffic and unsafe content.  

How to get started: To quick start your defense-in-depth campaign, we’ve developed default access policies that make it easy to implement security best practices, such as requiring multifactor authentication for all users. Check out these guides on requiring phishing-resistant multifactor authentication and planning your conditional access deployment. Finally, read up on our token protection, continuous access evaluation, and multifactor authentication fatigue suppression capabilities.

Priority 4: Unify access policies across identity, endpoint, and network security

In most organizations, the identity, endpoint, and network security functions are siloed, with teams using different technologies for managing access. This is problematic because it requires conditional access changes to be made in multiple places, increasing the chance of security holes, redundancies, and inconsistent access policies between teams. Identity, endpoint, and network tools need to be integrated under one policy engine, as neither category alone can protect all access points.

By adopting a Zero Trust security model that spans identity, endpoint, and network security, you can easily manage and enforce granular access policies in one place. This helps reduce operational complexity and can eliminate gaps in policy coverage. Plus, by enforcing universal conditional access policies from a single location, your policy engine can analyze a more diverse set of signals such as network, identity, endpoint, and application conditions before granting access to any resource—without making any code changes. 

Microsoft’s Security Service Edge (SSE) solution is identity-aware and is delivering a unique innovation to the SSE category by bringing together identity, endpoint, and network security access policies. The solution includes Microsoft Entra Internet Access, an SWG for safeguarding SaaS apps and internet traffic, as well as Microsoft Entra Private Access, a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution for securing access to all applications and resources. When you unify your network and identity access policies, it is easier to secure access and manage your organization’s conditional access lifecycle.

How to get started: Read these blogs to learn why their identity-aware designs make Microsoft Entra Internet Access and Microsoft Entra Private Access unique to the SSE category. To learn about the different use cases and scenarios, configuration prerequisites, and how to enable secure access, go to the Microsoft Entra admin center. 

Priority 5: Control identities and access for multicloud

Today, as multicloud adoption increases, it is harder than ever to gain full visibility over which identities, human or machine, have access to what resources across your various clouds.  Plus, with the massive increase in AI-driven workloads, the number of machine identities being used in multicloud environments is quickly rising, outnumbering human identities 10 to 1.⁵ Many of these identities are created with excessive permissions and little to no governance, with less than 5% of permissions granted actually used, suggesting that a vast majority of machine identities are not abiding by least privilege access principles. As a result, attackers have shifted their attention to apps, homing in on workload identities as a vulnerable new threat vector. Organizations need a unified control center for managing workload identities and permissions across all their clouds.

Securing access to your multicloud infrastructure across all identity types starts with selecting the methodology that makes sense for your organization. Zero Trust provides an excellent, customizable framework that applies just as well to workload identities as it does to human identities. You can effectively apply these principles with a cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) platform, which provides deep insights into the permissions granted across your multicloud, how they are used, and the ability to right size those permissions. Extending these controls to your machine identities will require a purpose-built tool for workload identities that uses strong credentials, conditional access policies, anomaly and risk signal monitoring, access reviews, and location restrictions.

Unifying and streamlining the management of your organization’s multicloud starts with diagnosing the health of your multicloud infrastructure with Microsoft Entra Permissions Management, which will help you discover, detect, right-size, and govern your organization’s multicloud identities. Then, using Microsoft Entra Workload ID, migrate your workload identities to managed identities where possible and apply strong Zero Trust principles and conditional access controls to them.

How to get started: Start a Microsoft Entra Permissions Management free trial to assess the state of your organization’s multicloud environment, then take the recommended actions to remediate any access right risks. Also, use Microsoft Entra Workload ID to assign conditional access policies to all of your apps, services, and machine identities based on least privilege principles.

Our commitment to continued partnership with you

It is our hope that the strategies in this blog help you form an actionable roadmap for securing access at your organization—for everyone, to everything.

But access security is not a one-way street, it is your continuous feedback that enables us to provide truly customer-centric solutions to the identity and access problems we face in 2024 and beyond.  We are grateful for the continued partnership and dialogue with you—from day-to-day interactions, to joint deployment planning, to the direct feedback that informs our strategy. As always, we remain committed to building the products and tools you need to defend your organization throughout 2024 and beyond.

Learn more about Microsoft Entra, or recap the identity at Microsoft Ignite blog.

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 X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹Microsoft Digital Defense Report, Microsoft. October 2023. 

²Work Trend Index Annual Report: Will AI Fix Work? Microsoft. May 9, 2023.

³Microsoft unveils expansion of AI for security and security for AI at Microsoft Ignite, Vasu Jakkal. November 15, 2023.

⁴How effective is multifactor authentication at deterring cyberattacks? Microsoft.

⁵2023 State of Cloud Permissions Risks report now published, Alex Simons. March 28, 2023.

The post 5 ways to secure identity and access for 2024 appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Protecting identities and access is critical. As our work and lives become increasingly digital, cyberattacks are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated, affecting organizations of every size, in every industry, and in every part of the world. In the last 12 months, we saw an average of more than 4,000 password attacks per second, an almost threefold increase from the 1,287 attacks per second we saw the previous year.² We’re also seeing far more sophisticated attacks, including ones that manage to evade critical defenses, such as multifactor authentication, to steal access tokens, impersonate a rightful user, and gain access to critical data.

To help organizations protect their ever-evolving digital estates, we’ve been expanding beyond managing directories and authenticating users to securing and governing access for any identity to any app or resource. Today, we’re thrilled to announce the next milestone in our vision of making it easy to secure access with two new products: Microsoft Entra Internet Access and Microsoft Entra Private Access. We’re adding these capabilities to help organizations instill trust, not only in their digital experiences and services but in every digital interaction that powers them.

Secure access to any app or resource, from anywhere

Flexible work arrangements and the resulting 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 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 multicloud environments, private networks, and data centers—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.

Together, Internet Access and Private Access, coupled with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, our SaaS security-focused cloud access security broker, comprise Microsoft’s Security Service Edge (SSE) solution. We’ll continue to evolve our SSE solution as an open platform that delivers the flexibility of choice between solutions from Microsoft and our partners. Pricing for Microsoft Entra Internet Access and Microsoft Entra Private Access will be available when those products reach general availability.

Figure 1. Microsoft’s Security Service Edge (SSE) solution.

Neither identity nor network security alone can protect the breadth of access points and scenarios that modern organizations require. That’s why, as cyberattacks get more sophisticated, we’re adding identity-centric network access to our cloud identity solutions. We’re converging controls for identity and network access so you can create unified Conditional Access policies that extend all protections and governance to all identities and resources. With a single place to safeguard and verify identities, manage permissions, and enforce intelligent access policies, protecting your digital estate has never been easier.

Microsoft Azure Active Directory is becoming Microsoft Entra ID

When we introduced Microsoft Entra in May of 2022, it included three products: Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Microsoft Entra Permissions Management, and Microsoft Entra Verified ID.¹ We later expanded the Microsoft Entra family with Microsoft Entra ID Governance and Microsoft Entra Workload ID.³ Today, Microsoft Entra protects any identity and secures access to any resource—on-premises, across clouds, and anywhere in between—with a product family that unifies multicloud identity and network access solutions.

To simplify our product naming and unify our product family, we’re 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. We’ll complete the name change from Azure AD to Microsoft Entra ID by the end of 2023. No action is needed from you.

Figure 2. With the name change to Microsoft Entra ID, the standalone license names are changing. Azure AD Free becomes Microsoft Entra ID Free. Azure AD Premium P1 becomes Microsoft Entra ID P1. Azure AD Premium P2 becomes Microsoft Entra ID P2. And our product for customer identities, Azure AD External Identities, becomes Microsoft Entra External ID. SKU and service plan name changes take effect on October 1, 2023.

More innovations in Microsoft Entra

Today we’d also like to highlight other innovations in the Microsoft Entra portfolio that strengthen defenses against attackers who are becoming more adept at exploiting identity-related vulnerabilities such as weak credentials, misconfigurations, and excessive access permissions.

Prevent identity takeover in real time

Several exciting changes to Microsoft Entra ID Protection (currently Azure AD Identity Protection) help IT and identity practitioners prevent account compromise. Instead of reactively revoking access based on stale data, ID Protection uses the power of advanced machine learning to identify sign-in anomalies and anomalous user behavior and then block, challenge, or limit access in real time. For example, it may trigger a risk-based Conditional Access policy that requires high-assurance and phishing-resistant authentication methods for accessing sensitive resources.

A new dashboard demonstrates the impact of the identity protections that organizations deploy with a comprehensive snapshot of prevented identity attacks and the most common attack patterns. On the dashboard, you can view simple metric cards and attack graphs that show risk origins, security posture over time, types of current attacks, as well as recommendations based on risk exposure, while highlighting the business impact of enforced controls. With these insights, you can further investigate your organization’s security posture in additional tools and applications for enhanced recommendations.

Figure 3. New Microsoft Entra ID Protection dashboard.

Automate access governance

An important part of securing access for any identity to any app is ensuring that only the right identities have the right access at the right time. Some organizations only realize they need to take this approach when they fail a security audit. Microsoft Entra ID Governance, now generally available, is a complete identity governance solution that helps you comply with organizational and regulatory security requirements while increasing employee productivity through real-time, self-service, and workflow-based app entitlements.⁴

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. Our global system integrator partners—including Edgile, a Wipro company, EY, KPMG, and PwC—started helping with the planning and deployment of ID Governance on July 1, 2023.

Figure 4. New Microsoft Entra ID Governance dashboard.

Personalize and secure access to any application for customers and partners

As we 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 customization options, Conditional Access, identity protection, and support for social identity providers. Using our comprehensive developer tools, even those developers who have little to no identity experience can create personalized sign-in and sign-up experiences for their applications within minutes.

Simplify identity verification with Microsoft Entra Verified ID

Since we announced the general availability of Microsoft Entra Verified ID last summer, organizations around the world have been reinventing business processes, such as new employee onboarding, around this new, simpler way of verifying someone’s identity.⁵ For example, we recently announced that millions of LinkedIn members will be able to verify their place of work using a Verified ID credential.⁶ At the 2023 Microsoft Build event, we launched the Microsoft Entra Verified ID SDK so that developers can quickly add a secure digital wallet to any mobile application. The app can then store and verify a wide range of digital ID cards.

Microsoft Entra: Secure access for a connected world

You can see our expanded Microsoft Entra product family in Figure 5. Visit the Microsoft Entra website to learn more.

Figure 5. The Microsoft Entra family of identity and network access products.

We’re 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. As part of that commitment, we’ll keep expanding Microsoft Entra to provide the broadest possible coverage along with a flexible and agile model where people, organizations, apps, and even smart things can confidently make real-time access decisions.

Encourage your technical teams to dive deeper into these announcements by attending the Tech Accelerator event on July 20, 2023, on the Microsoft Tech Community.

Microsoft Entra

Meet the family of multicloud identity and access products.

Learn more

Learn more

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.

¹Secure access for a connected world—meet Microsoft Entra, Joy Chik and Vasu Jakkal. May 31, 2022.

²Microsoft internal data.

³Do more with less—Discover the latest Microsoft Entra innovations, Joy Chik. October 19, 2022.

⁴Microsoft Entra ID Governance is generally available, Joseph Dadzie. June 7, 2023.

⁵Microsoft Entra Verified ID now generally available, Ankur Patel. August 8, 2022.

⁶LinkedIn and Microsoft Entra introduce a new way to verify your workplace, Joy Chik. April 12, 2023.

The post Microsoft Entra expands into Security Service Edge and Azure AD becomes Microsoft Entra ID appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.