Microsoft ‘Entra’ launch renews push for decentralized, cross-cloud ID permissions – GeekWire

Microsoft is rebranding its identity and access products as “Hall”, and deploy a decentralized system to verify online identities, confirm permissions and grant access to users.

The company will make its identity service decentralized, Verified ID, usually available in August. This is a rebranded version of what was previously available for public preview as Azure Active Directory Verifiable Credentials.

With the launch of Verified ID, Microsoft says it is implementing industry standards for decentralized online identity, promising to streamline the complex employee onboarding processfor exemple.

The company is positioning Verified ID as an alternative to the single sign-on approach used by Facebook and others.

“Instead of granting broad consent to countless apps and services and disseminating identity data across numerous vendors, Verified ID empowers individuals and organizations to decide what information they share, when they share it, with who they share them and, if necessary, take them. back”, explain Joy Chik and Vasu Jakkal, vice presidents of Microsoft, in a post announcing the launch of Entra.

Microsoft has been working on digital identity and access technologies in different forms for decades, but the company embraced this decentralized approach several years ago. as founding member of the Alliance ID2020.

The company is also launching a new CIEM (cloud infrastructure entitlement management) service called Managing Microsoft Entra Permissionsbased on its acquisition of CloudKnox Security last yearpermission management on Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.

Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory, the widely used enterprise identity and access management service, will also operate under the Entra umbrella, the company said.

It’s part of a broader effort to reshape the company’s security, privacy and identity businesses under the leadership of Charlie Bell, the former Amazon Web Services executive who joined Microsoft last year. last as Executive Vice President, leading what was then a new Security, Compliance, Identity and Organization Management group.

Bell recently rolled out a division reorganization and a set of “organizing principles,” according to a May 18 report by Insider. The tenets include his belief in “the creation of engineering primitives as the basis upon which we can build building blocks for our various products and services, as well as our ecosystem of developers and partners.”

With the launch of Entra, prices will remain the same (monthly fee per user) for Azure Active Directory and external identities, Alex Simons, vice president of Microsoft Product Management for Identity and Network Access, says ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley. Verified ID will be part of Azure Active Directory for pricing purposes, with premium services planned for the future.