Series
Microsoft Entra ID: Identity and Access Management on Azure
A ten-part series that builds a complete, practitioner-grade picture of Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft's cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) service for Azure — from the design principles behind a sound IAM strategy through to the day-to-day admin surface that keeps it running. It opens by framing what good IAM looks like and how Entra ID compares to on-premises Active Directory Domain Services, then works systematically through tenant setup and administrative units, licensing and feature tiers, groups and access reviews, self-service password reset, device management and guest access, multi-factor authentication, Conditional Access and Identity Protection, application and workload identities, and hybrid identity synchronisation. Together, the posts deliver both the operational depth needed to run Entra ID day to day and the design-level judgement to architect it well — covering the hands-on knowledge tested by AZ-104 and the strategic trade-offs assessed by AZ-305.
10 parts
- 1 Designing Identity and Access Management on Azure: Microsoft Entra ID vs Active Directory First in a series of notes on Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft's cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) service. This post covers the design principles …
- 2 Microsoft Entra ID: Features, Licensing Tiers, and Microsoft Entra Domain Services Second in this series on Microsoft Entra ID. Where the previous post covered design principles and how Entra ID structurally compares to Active Directory Domai…
- 3 Creating and Administering a Microsoft Entra Tenant Third in this series on Microsoft Entra ID, moving from concepts into the hands-on side: creating and customising a tenant, then delegating administration with…
- 4 Groups, Access Reviews, and Group-Based Licensing in Microsoft Entra ID Fourth in this series on Microsoft Entra ID, covering groups: what the different group types are for, how access reviews keep group membership honest over time…
- 5 Self-Service Password Reset in Microsoft Entra ID Fifth in this series on Microsoft Entra ID, focused specifically on self-service password reset (SSPR): who it can be assigned to, how the admin experience dif…
- 6 Device Management and Inviting Guest Users in Microsoft Entra ID Sixth in this series on Microsoft Entra ID, covering how identities get extended to two kinds of "not quite a standard internal user" scenarios: devices, and e…
- 7 Multi-Factor Authentication in Microsoft Entra ID Seventh in this series on Microsoft Entra ID, covering multi-factor authentication (MFA): the core mechanics, how to configure it, and a set of corrections to …
- 8 Conditional Access and Identity Protection in Microsoft Entra ID Eighth in this series on Microsoft Entra ID, covering the two risk-based access control layers that sit on top of MFA: Conditional Access and Identity Protecti…
- 9 Application and Workload Identities in Microsoft Entra ID Ninth in this series on Microsoft Entra ID, covering how applications and automated workloads — as opposed to human users — get represented and secured: applic…
- 10 Hybrid Identity: Authentication and Synchronisation in Microsoft Entra ID Tenth and last in this series on Microsoft Entra ID, covering the operational mechanics of hybrid identity: which authentication method actually validates a si…