As cyber attacks increase in frequency and severity, the ability to secure the identities of your end users is central to keeping your organization secure.
In a mobile-first, cloud-first world, organizations need to view security as a matter of identity management. By using identity as the control plane, IT can benefit from the visibility and insights that come only from machine learning applied to vast datasets, and the protection applied at multiple layers to monitor and identify threats.
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 apps 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.
You may have seen some of these innovations in action at Ignite, when I demoed
- Detecting Anomalous Sign-Ins with EMS
- Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics
- Document Tracking & Secure Collaboration with Azure RMS
Today we are pleased to announce the next steps in our identity story
Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) forms the foundation of our identity-driven approach, and Azure AD will now extend to secure not only the identities of your employees but also external identities including partners, vendors, contractors, and also your customers.
This means two new capabilities:
- A brand new Azure AD B2C service that delivers cloud scale identity and access management solutions to help you secure your customer facing applications.
- Azure AD B2B collaboration– a new feature of Azure AD (also included as part of the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite) that helps secure business-to-business collaboration with the partner organizations that you work with every day.
Customers are already seeing the benefits of these new offers. Using the preview of Azure AD B2C, Real Madrid is able to connect with their global fan base at massive scale:
“Azure Active Directory B2C helps us bring the stadium closer to our 450 million fans around the globe with simplified registration and login through social accounts like Facebook, or traditional username/passwords login. We’re able to provide a seamless experience across mobile applications on any platform.
By using Azure Active Directory B2C we were able to build a fully customized login page without having to build custom code. Additionally, with a Microsoft solution in place, we alleviated all our concerns about security, data breaches, and scalability.”
— Rafael de los Santos, Head of Digital, Real Madrid
Public preview for Azure Active Directory B2C
Providing a secure identity platform to underpin your consumer-facing apps is a fundamental part of maintaining customer trust, satisfaction, and retention. However, doing these things at scale can be incredibly complex. For example, managing user accounts and passwords for millions of consumers presents the huge challenge of maintaining high availability while ensuring security. In the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Identity and Access Management as a Service, Gartner writes that, “B2C use cases have grown in importance as organizations look to replace a mixture of custom-developed IAM products and traditional on-premises IAM products.”*
The cloud brings new agility and economic value to delivering and succeeding in the face of such a challenge. Microsoft Azure Active Directory, the cloud service with proven scale in handling billions of authentications per day, now extends its capabilities to manage and protect your consumer identities with Microsoft Azure Active Directory B2C.
Azure Active Directory B2C is a highly available, global, identity and access management service for your consumer-facing applications that scales to hundreds of millions of protected identities.
Along with security and scale, Azure Active Directory B2C also easily integrates with nearly any platform, and it is accessible across devices. This functionality means that your consumers will be able to use their existing social media accounts or create new credentials to single-sign on to your applications through a fully customizable user experience. Optional multi-factor authentication will also be available to add additional protection.
ZEISS, an international leader in the fields of optics and optoelectronics utilized Azure Active Directory B2C to empower their customer software download portal:
“Azure Active Directory B2C helped us bring our customer software download portal online within weeks instead of months. Support, scalability, and easy to handle software convinced us B2C was the right choice for this critical project“
— Fabian Peschel, ZEISS Industrial Metrology
Azure Active Directory B2C will offer a free tier to get started and experiment, and a tiered volume-based pricing model above that. We’ll be able to share more details on the licensing options for Azure Active Directory B2C when the service reaches General Availability.
Here’s how you can get started with Azure Active Directory B2C:
- Watch this video to see the benefits of cloud based consumer identity and access management.
- Read more technical information from the Azure Active Directory blog.
- Get started with Azure Active Directory B2C in your consumer app.
Public preview for Azure Active Directory B2B collaboration
Securing identities beyond your own employees and expanding to your network of partners and contractors is critical to protecting your organization’s data. As a part of our growing identity-driven security capabilities, we are excited to announce the preview of Azure Active Directory B2B collaboration as additional functionality available in all Azure AD editions, and as 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.
Kodak Alaris, a company that is passionate about using technology to transform organizations and improve people's lives in the imaging and information management industry, uses Azure AD B2B collaboration to provide access to shared resources to all their partners.
“We needed to quickly and cost effectively stand up new IT infrastructure including extranet applications for thousands of business partners. Azure AD B2B provides a simple and secure way for partners, large and small, to use their own credentials to access Kodak Alaris systems.
The Azure AD team has been an incredible partner in our re-creation of a more agile and cost-effective hybrid cloud IT infrastructure.”
— Steven C. Braunschweiger, Chief Enterprise Architect, Kodak Alaris
Learn more about Azure AD B2B collaboration on our Azure AD team blog.
Also, if you’re attending Dreamforce, take some time to stop by the Microsoft area in the DevZone and talk to our team about these identity-driven security solutions.
*Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
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