Microsoft Entra innovations announced at RSAC 2026

Agentic AI is reshaping how organizations work, and it is fundamentally changing how we must think about protecting identity and access. As AI accelerates innovation, the number of users, devices, apps, and agents is exploding, creating an unprecedented number of digital identities across disparate systems. Every new identity, whether human or non-human, represents another potential entry point for attackers and another potential gap in visibility. In the 2026 Secure Access report, 97% of organizations experienced an identity or network access incident in the past year, and 70% reported incidents tied to AI-related activity. 

The attack surface is growing faster than traditional security approaches can keep up, forcing organizations to rethink how they protect their identities and data at scale. This is why security must start with an access fabric, which creates a common identity foundation for employees, workloads, and AI agents, continuously shares signals and evaluates risk, and enforces access decisions in real time across every identity and session.

The latest Microsoft Entra innovations advance this vision, so you can protect access for people and agents and strengthen your Zero Trust posture. With those new capabilities you can:

• Protect agent identities with the same rigor as users, apps and devices, using familiar protections like identity governance and Conditional Access in Microsoft Entra Agent ID, the identity foundation of Microsoft Agent 365.
• Secure employee access in the AI era, from shadow AI discovery and prompt injection protection to strong phishing-resistant authentication enabled by flexible passkey deployments, extensibility to the broad range external MFA providers, and adaptive risk remediation.
• Strengthen your identity foundation by protecting your multi-tenant environments with Tenant governance, adding a layer of resilience with Backup and Recovery, making it possible to restore critical identity objects with confidence and accelerating Identity Security by improved identity risk detection, analytics and remediation, connecting identity and SecOps team to respond faster and proactively improve your identity security posture.
• Supercharge your identity team with new Conditional Access agent capabilities, including context-aware recommendations, phased rollout for any policy, and automated least-privilege enforcement. You can also discover and extend identity integrations with Microsoft Security Store.

Throughout the week at RSAC, we’ll be demonstrating these capabilities and sharing practical guidance on how to build a more resilient, comprehensive identity and access security strategy. Below is a closer look at the innovations and where to see them in action at the RSAC.

Protect agent identities

As organizations adopt AI agents at scale, many are deployed without consistent controls. As shared earlier this month, Microsoft Entra Agent ID, the identity foundation of Microsoft Agent 365, helps secure agent identities and their access to resources by assigning a unique ID to AI agents built with Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Copilot Studio and our Agent 365 ecosystem partners. This gives identity teams a consistent way to apply the same rigor they use for users, apps and devices identities.

With that foundation in place, we are integrating ID Governance access packages into Microsoft Agent 365 Security Policy Templates, so agents can start secure as they are onboarded. We are also extending existing Conditional Access user policies to secure agents that work on behalf of users. These protections help make real-time access decisions based on risk signals and custom security attributes. Together, they help prevent compromise and reduce the risk of misuse by malicious actors.

Secure employee access in the AI era

As AI becomes embedded in daily work, organizations need consistent controls governing access to apps, data, and AI services. Microsoft Entra Suite unifies identity and network access under a single policy framework to help deliver Zero Trust access to any resource, including AI applications and agents.  

Microsoft Entra Internet Access extends identity-based Zero Trust controls to web, SaaS, and AI traffic. It provides visibility into AI tools and agents and helps secure employee access as usage grows.

Key innovations in Internet Access include:

• Shadow AI detection complementing Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps to discover and monitor unsanctioned AI applications, track usage, and instantly enforce Conditional Access to allow or block those apps (generally available).
• Prompt injection protection to block malicious AI prompts (generally available).

Microsoft Entra continues to advance passwordless authentication experiences, strengthening how users prove who they are and ensuring secure, low‑friction access as AI usage accelerates: 

• Synced passkeys and passkey profiles to enable seamless, phishing‑resistant sign‑in and deployment across your organization (generally available).
• Microsoft Entra Passkeys on Windows to extend Windows Hello experiences, making passkeys even more seamless for users on Windows devices (preview).
• External MFA (formerly called External Authentication Methods) to enable integration of MFA providers directly with Microsoft Entra ID and your existing Conditional Access policies (generally available).
• Adaptive risk remediation enables passwordless users to securely regain access without help-desk friction. Entra ID Protection supports appropriate automatic self-remediation across all authentication methods, passwordless and those that still use passwords, adapting to where customers are in their modern authentication journey (generally available in April 2026).

These updates help protect identities and access points while moving organizations closer to a passwordless future.

Strengthen your identity foundation

Organizations require the ability to proactively govern multi-tenant environments and recover quickly from misconfigurations or compromises. To address this need, we're introducing new capabilities that strengthen identity resilience and minimize risk of managing complex, multitenant environments:

• Microsoft Entra Backup and Recovery enables confident recovery of critical directory objects to a known good state after accidental changes or security compromises. Automated, high-performance backups and point-in-time restore capabilities help reduce recovery time and support operational continuity (preview).
• Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance helps you centrally govern multi-tenant environments, reduce risk from shadow IT tenants, and enforce a consistent security posture. You can discover and inventory tenants, establish governance relationships, monitor tenant configurations, and securely create new tenants (preview). The tenant configuration API helps you simplify and standardize how tenant settings are managed across Microsoft workloads with JSON-based configuration baselines (preview).
• Microsoft Entra cross-tenant group synchronization helps organizations securely manage access across related tenants by enabling governed, policy-driven group sharing without duplicating identities or increasing administrative overhead. By centralizing group lifecycle management and enforcing consistent governance controls across tenants, organizations can reduce access sprawl, simplify collaboration, and maintain least‑privilege access in complex multi-tenant environments (preview).

Accelerate your identity security 

But resilience alone isn’t enough. Modern identity security means stopping attacks before they escalate. And, as identities expand beyond human users, organizations need to extend their identity security tools to protect users, apps, and agentic identities across their identity fabric.

We're advancing identity security with unified risk and enhanced detections across Entra and Defender. Powered by trillions of signals across Microsoft Security, risk-based Conditional Access can now make more informed and intelligent access decisions based on aggregated risk across identity accounts. This improves identity protection for high-impact scenarios like lateral movement and privilege escalation and strengthens protection across cloud and hybrid environments. With shared visibility across Identity and Security Operations teams, admins gain a deeper understanding of their risky identities and can respond more efficiently across their cloud and hybrid infrastructure.

Supercharge your identity team

Conditional Access is central to Zero Trust architecture, but policies can drift as environments change. The Conditional Access Agent in Microsoft Entra helps continuously analyze access policies and deliver recommendations aligned to your unique environment. It identifies persistent gaps and helps strengthen protections without disrupting productivity.

We’re introducing new capabilities that make the Conditional Access Agent more intelligent, personalized, and actionable (preview):

• Context-aware recommendations tailored to your environment.
• Enhanced phased rollout for gradual, controlled deployment.
• Continuous deep gap analysis to identify persistent or emerging policy gaps.
• Automated least-privilege enforcement to reduce unnecessary permissions.
• Zero Trust posture reporting that helps demonstrate measurable improvements.
• Passkey deployment campaigns that streamline phishing-resistant authentication rollout.

Discover and extend identity integrations with Microsoft Security Store

Security Copilot agents help teams optimize and act, while the Microsoft Security Store helps them extend and scale. As identity environments expand, organizations increasingly rely on partner capabilities to address specialized needs. By bringing the Microsoft Security Store directly into Microsoft Entra, teams can now find trusted, Microsoft Entra‑ready agents and integrations within the product experience.

The Microsoft Security Store helps customers discover identity solutions from Microsoft and partners, including integrations with Entra External ID and Entra Verified ID, plus more than 15 identity agents powered by Security Copilot that surface identity posture gaps, strengthen identity verification, reduce fraud across workforce, consumer, and external identities, and more.  This centralized discovery and purchasing experience reduces friction and helps teams deploy solutions more quickly through the Microsoft Security Store. Read more.

Where to find Microsoft Entra at RSAC 2026

Before RSAC begins, Microsoft Security product leaders will host a pre-day session on Sunday, March 22 at 4:00pm PST in the Palace Hotel to share how security is the foundation of Frontier Transformation. Learn more about our security vision, top threat intelligence trends, and product demos ahead of the event. Secure your spot today.

During the week, come connect with the Microsoft Entra team at RSAC. Visit the Microsoft booth #5744 to experience live product demonstrations and participate in our expert-led theater sessions.

 Executive Lunch and Learn Session at the Palace Hotel

 

 

Microsoft Entra Theater Sessions in booth #5744

 

We look forward to seeing you in March at RSAC 2026. Visit the Microsoft booth, join our theater sessions, and explore how Microsoft Entra helps secure your access fabric in the age of AI.

 

-Irina Nechaeva

General Manager, Identity and Network Access Product Marketing

 

Additional resources

• Microsoft Security at RSAC Announcements

• Secure agentic AI for your Frontier Transformation

 

Learn more about Microsoft Entra

Prevent identity attacks, ensure least privilege access, unify access controls, and improve the experience for users with comprehensive identity and network access solutions across on-premises and clouds.

• ⁠Microsoft Entra News and Insights | Microsoft Security Blog
• ⁠⁠Microsoft Entra blog | Tech Community
• ⁠Microsoft Entra documentation | Microsoft Learn
• Microsoft Entra discussions | Microsoft Community