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Microsoft Entra External Authentication Is Now Generally Available!

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There’s a moment every identity engineer knows too well: you’re designing an access flow, everything looks clean on paper, and then someone says the words that derail the whole architecture— “We need to use our existing MFA provider.” Historically, that sentence meant pain. You either duct‑taped Custom Controls into Conditional Access, built brittle redirects, or told the business “no” and hoped they forgot. Finally, that tailspin is over. Microsoft has rolled out a new capability in Entra that changes the external authentication story entirely. Instead of relying on proprietary hooks or deprecated features, Entra now supports standards‑based external authentication using OpenID Connect . In plain English: you can plug in a third‑party identity or MFA provider, and Entra treats it like its own. Why This Matters More Than You Think Identity teams have been asking for this for years, and not because they enjoy wiring up extra systems. The real world is messy. Organizations merge. Unive...
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Recover with Confidence: Entra Backup & Recovery for Real‑World Resilience

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When something goes wrong in your tenant, the clock starts ticking. A misconfigured Conditional Access policy, a deleted app registration, a user object overwritten by automation—every minute of downtime chips away at productivity, trust, and continuity. In the past, recovering from these moments meant stitching together logs, exporting stale configs, or rebuilding objects by hand. Microsoft Entra’s new Backup and Recovery capability changes that equation entirely. This isn’t just another checkbox feature. It’s a safety net for the identity layer—the part of your environment that absolutely cannot fail. Daily, Automatic Backups—No Setup Required Entra now automatically captures one backup per day , retaining the last five days of your tenant’s core identity configuration. No agents. No jobs. No maintenance windows. Just quiet, consistent snapshots of the objects that define your tenant’s security posture. These backups include key identity components such as: Users Groups Application...
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Hardware and Entra External ID: A New Way to Authenticate

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So, you’ve decided to automate your home. You pick up a Raspberry Pi, maybe an Arduino UNO or two, wire up some sensors, and start imagining all the dashboards and automations you’re about to build. But before anything even blinks or beeps, you hit your first roadblock: how do I control all of this? Naturally, you spin up a small Django web app, pull in a few Python libraries to talk to your Arduinos, and expose some endpoints. Great—now you can control your devices. But then the second roadblock hits: how do you access it securely? If you're an Azure‑first shop, the answer historically wasn’t great. For consumer‑grade IoT, TVs, or constrained devices, you’d often end up reaching for AWS Cognito or Okta because Microsoft simply didn’t offer a clean, standard way to authenticate on devices that can’t show a login screen. That gap just closed. Microsoft has introduced full support for the OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant—a capability designed specifically for IoT devices, smart T...
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What Microsoft 365 E7 Means for Identity

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Hey there! So if you have been active on LinkedIn for the past couple of days, you probably saw some rumors about a new licensing tier making it's way into Microsoft. Well, those rumors have since been confirmed by Microsoft to be true and in good ol' content creator fashion, you KNOW I had to make a post about it. Particularly, I want to talk about what this means for identity and what you can expect with this new tier in the Enterprise licensing model. For those in the identity space, E7 provides great new features that give admins the ability to avail of things not traditionally found in other enterprise license tiers below it. Without further ado, let's break into it! What Exactly Is E7 Bringing to the Identity Table? E7 isn’t just “E5 with extra seasoning.” It introduces capabilities that meaningfully shift how organizations can approach identity governance, insider risk, and privileged access. For identity folks, this tier finally bundles together a set of controls th...
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Account Recovery Made Simple with Entra

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We have all been there: you have a user that needs to have their account recovered, whether it be over the phone, an email, carrier pigeon, etc. However, we do not have a surefire way to verify their identity. Sure, you can send a follow-up email and ask for them to include their photo ID, assuming you're bold enough to click on that attachment that is definitely the real person and not malware. Once you've done that, now you have five more tickets that have just piled up in your queue and your boss wants to know about that project you're working on. Sound familiar? Well, this is a common issue that plagues a lot of IT teams and results in the loss of productivity as well as revenue. 30% to be precise. Only if there was a way to take the administrative load off of the IT staff, and give control back to the user, all within a compliant environment... Look no more! Now, Microsoft has unveiled the next step in verifying user identities by using real credentials and facial reco...
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