Azure Active Directory

Azure Active Directory provides a universal identity platform for your business. It is a cloud-based identity and access management system. It helps in the sign-in of your employees easily and accesses the resources in SaaS applications such as Office 365, Azure portal, and also into internal resources, like an intranet or other cloud services developed by your organization. Azure Active Directory is intended for App developers, IT Administrators, and Office 365 subscribers.

It can be used to add a single sign-on to your app which allows you to work with pre-existing credentials. It also allows you to access applications and their resources based on your business requirements, like multi-factor authentication for accessing confidential information.

Azure Identity Management and Access Control Security

Azure Active Directory helps you to provide roles that limit administrators to manage identity tasks in less-privileged roles. Administrators can be assigned new roles for such purposes as adding or changing users, assigning administrative roles, resetting user passwords, managing user licenses, and managing domain names. The default permissions of users can be changed only in user settings in Azure AD. So the main access is still intact and you can basically appoint administrators to handle some of your workloads just like hierarchy.

Using this will actually limit the use of the global administrator and much use of roles accordingly. Azure Active Directory also helps you to categorize and filter out the roles for easier use. Also, you can create new roles or add or remove permissions from the existing ones.
It is quite easy to add or remove the roles as per your convenience. The already available roles are :

  • Application Administrator
  • Application Developer
  • Cloud Application Administrator
  • Directory Readers

How to use Azure Active Directory for secure user access management?

Azure Active Directory combines identity protection, application access management and core directory services into a single possible solution. The security of user accessibility can be best implemented by the following:

  • Treat identity as the primary security perimeter
  • Enable password management
  • Turn on Conditional Access
  • Centralized identity management
  • Use Azure Active Directory for storage authentication
  • Enable single sign-on
  • Control locations where resources are located
  • Plan for routine security improvements
  • Manage connected tenants
  • Enforce multi-factor verification for users
  • Use role-based access control
  • Lower exposure of privileged accounts
  • Strengthening credentials
  • Protect privileged accounts with Multi-factor Authentication
  • Choose a password-less authentication option