Microsoft expands identity security through new Azure AD features

Today Microsoft’s Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President for Enterprise Client and Mobility, announced over on his In The Cloud blog two new capabilities that the company is making available through its Azure Active Directory service.

These new features, Azure AD B2C & Azure AD B2B collaboration, will now help you secure the identities of your external partners, vendors, contractors and customers.

Anderson says this is necessary as the scope of cyberattacks are increasing in frequency and in their severity. These new features will extend protection that is already available through other services Microsoft provides:

Identity-driven security is so important that we have made it central to our overall enterprise mobility strategy.  In the last four months, we have made huge strides in building out our solutions in this area.  Now you can discover Shadow IT cloud applications and provide Just-In-Time administration privileges, get visibility when your identities are leaked, identify and stop cyber-attacks against your on-premises assets with Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics, and protect critical company data across popular cloud applications including Salesforce, Box, Dropbox, ServiceNow, and Office 365 with our recent acquisition of cloud security innovator Adallom.

Breaches of networks and user data is a hot topic item these days and it is incumbent on businesses to take every step necessary to protect their customers and their business assets from malicious threats.

Azure Active Directory B2C provides identity and access management for your consumer facing applications that can easily scale through Azure AD to protect millions of identities.

There is a free tier being offered that will allow you to check out this service and evaluate the service for your business and then the tiered volume based pricing kicks in after that.

To get started with Azure Active Directory B2C Microsoft recommends the following steps:

Azure Active Directory B2B collaboration is also being offered as a public preview and is available in all Azure AD editions and will be part of the Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS).

B2B collaboration provides simplified management and security for partners and other external users accessing your in-house resources using Azure AD as the control plane.  This includes access to popular cloud applications such as Salesforce, Dropbox, Workday, and of course, Office 365 – and all of this is in addition to mobile, cloud, and on-premises claims-aware applications.

You can read more about Azure Active Directory B2B at the Azure AD blog.