Building better identity solutions with our partners at Microsoft Inspire

Microsoft

Jul 21, 2020

Hello Everyone -

This week is Microsoft Inspire where we celebrate our partners that have helped us innovate and accelerate growth over the last year. Whether businesses are starting their journey to cloud identity, migrating applications to modern authentication, or rolling out a passwordless solution to their employees, they often need help. That's where our identity partners come in, offering everything from migration support to integrating their solutions with our identity platform. They’re a critical part to help us achieve our 5 identity priorities that we outlined earlier this year. We’ve seen amazing progress in our partner ecosystem and wanted to share just some of the ways our partners are contributing to our 5 identity priorities of 2020:

Priority 1: Connect all applications and cloud resources to improve access controls and the user experience.

As employees adapt to remote work, they need secure, seamless access to all types of applications from cloud apps to on-premises apps. Organizations are simplifying and securing access to our partner applications like Cisco Webex, Zoom, Box, Docusign, Workplace from Facebook thanks to Azure AD. Hundreds of partners have built integrations that support single sign-on and user provisioning and our Azure AD app gallery has grown to over 3,400 pre-integrated applications.

While the usage of cloud apps continues to grow, many organizations still rely on legacy-auth based applications. Thanks to our secure hybrid access partners - Akamai, Citrix, f5 and Zscaler - we’ve been able to help customers access legacy-auth based applications that use protocols like header-based and Kerberos authentication.

Priority 2: Empower developers to integrate identity into their apps and improve security.

At Microsoft Build we announced several enhancements to make it easier for developers to create secure and trustworthy apps. We’ve already seen hundreds of developers get publisher verified that help admins and end-users understand the authenticity of who an app developer is. Over 660 applications by 390 publishers have been verified thus far.

We also added more Azure AD capabilities in Microsoft Graph to enable our partners to build identity and security focused applications and workflows. For example, Lumagate, built an AI-powered chatbot that simplifies management of identities and endpoints with Microsoft Graph. RSA has leveraged Azure AD’s risky user data and other Microsoft security signals to enrich their risk score engine. And f5 is using the Azure AD application gallery API to simplify the configuration of select SAP and Oracle applications between Azure AD and f5 BIG-IP APM.

We’ve also extended Azure AD B2C capabilities with several partners that enable developers to further protect their customer-facing applications. Developers can integrate with partners including LexisNexis and Experian for risk analysis and fraud detection and integrate with partners like IDology, Jumio, and Onfido to perform identity verification and proofing.

Priority 3: Go passwordless to make security effortless for users.

Our goal to eliminate dependencies on passwords and replace them with more secure authentication can only be achieved with our partners. Over 150 million people – across our consumer accounts and Azure AD accounts - are signing in using passwordless methods each month. Azure AD supports platform, software, and hardware authenticator options that are phishing-resistant and user-friendly to meet your business needs. Our partners below have built a variety of hardware security keys to choose from that meet FIDO2 standards and integrate with Azure AD. Partners like Yubico and Feitian have recently released new security keys like the iePass FIDO Security Key and YubiKey 5Ci that are designed for ease-of-use with mobile devices.

Priority 4: Enable boundaryless collaboration and automated access lifecycle for all users.

To improve access lifecycle for all users we’ve worked with HR systems like SAP SuccessFactors and Workday to enhance our existing integrations. Earlier this year we announced the public preview of user provisioning from SAP SuccessFactors to Azure AD allowing you to easily orchestrate user data from SAP SuccessFactors into Azure AD. We also added more enhancements to our existing Workday integrations such as support for more writeback fields and the ability to specify the Workday API version to use.

Effective collaboration across employees, partners and customers requires more than simply connecting them to the right resources but ensuring they have the right access. Our integrations with Identity Governance partners like Saviynt and Omada provide advanced governance scenarios such segregation of duties, complex workflows and granular reporting across hybrid application estates, and governance for Microsoft Teams. Additionally, our industry-focused partners like Imprivata provide clinical access governance for cloud and legacy healthcare applications (i.e. EHRs).

Priority 5: Start your Zero Trust journey to protect your organization as you digitally transform.

Zero Trust starts with a strong identity foundation. With customers around the globe responding to COVID-19 by moving their office employees to remote work, identity-driven security solutions are required to help safeguard company resources. Many of our service partners are helping customers implement a Zero Trust security strategy that puts identity at the center. For example, partners like Concurrency, Edgile and Optiv have helped customers transition to remote work with our identity driven security solutions making it easier and more secure for employees to work from home.

Join us virtually, live or on-demand

While we wish we could all meet in person this year at Microsoft Inspire 2020, we have a great line up of free, virtual sessions to share with you wherever you are in the world. If you’re a partner looking to build a practice with Azure AD be sure to attend our identity sessions below and learn how to take advantage of our identity workshops that will help you assess the maturity of your customers identity estate.

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