What is Azure Active Directory?
Azure AD is an identity and access management cloud solution that provides a set of capabilities to manage users and groups. According to the company, it helps secure access to on-premise and cloud applications. For IT Admins, Azure AD provides an affordable, easy to use solution to give employees and business partners access to a host of cloud SaaS Applications like Office365, Concur, Salesforce, and DropBox. Its new features include Azure AD Identity Protection, Azure AD Privileged Identity Management and Azure AD Premium P2.
What is Azure AD Identity Protection?
The company claims that Azure AD Identity Protection is Azure’s cloud security is a one of a kind service that uses state of the art machine learning to analyze 10TB of behavioral and contextual data daily, to detect and prevent attempts to attack enterprise Azure AD accounts.
How does it work?
The Azure AD Identity Protection gives the user a dashboard, which provides a consolidated view of risk data for the user’s tenant. Users at risk of credential compromise, risk events which indicate anomalous logins or other indications of a login attempt and vulnerabilities in their environment which they can address with configuration changes and help them set up risk-based Conditional Access policies to block attacks in real time.
Users can view specific login issues, such as users logging in from anomalous locations, botnet infected devices or from networks associated with account hijacking risk. It also provides a consolidated view of configuration issues in the user’s environment. The dashboard provides a consolidated view of configuration and policy issues, and provides recommendations for remediation.
What is Azure AD Privileged Identity Management?
Microsoft states that Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM) is the world’s first cloud based privileged identity management solution which lets the user increase the security of their Azure AD administrator accounts and improve administrative compliance and auditing. The Azure AD Premium P2 is a new SKU of Azure AD, which includes all the capabilities in Azure AD Premium P1, new Identity Protection and Privileged Identity Management.
How does it work?
According to the company IT admins in enterprises have needed permanent and unmonitored access to high-value resources, both on-premises and in the cloud. Though convenient but it poses major security concerns as user accounts become high-value targets for security attacks.
The Azure AD Privileged Identity Management service claims to help organizations reduce risks associated with privileged users and their access rights by identifying the most privileged users are across Azure AD, Office365, Intune and other services, with a dashboard, APIs and notifications of new role assignments. It makes these users eligible for ‘Just in time’ (JIT) role activation to limit the time of the roles.
It also claims to retrieve alerts and audit reports for tracking and monitoring privileged users’ assignments and activations and conduct access reviews of privileged user accounts by admins or designated reviews to assure the admins continue to require access to privileged roles and access permissions.
The General Availability has been announced by the company to hit the market on the 15th of September.
