I’ve had many people ask me this question lately: “Hey I noticed this icon changed from AzureAD to EntraID, What up with that MJ?”

Well that’s a good question! To me this boils down in to two talking points. My first talking point, I swear I picked up from Microsoft either in a blog post, video, etc, and the second is something I’m reading between the lines on.

Microsoft Point

Microsoft has stated that this is exclusively a rebrand of an existing service in order to create a better distinction between: On-Premise Active Directory (AD), Azure Active Directory Domain Services (Azure AD DS), and formerly Azure Active Directory (AAD).

MJ’s Point

If we think about what a modern Identity Provider (IdP) should have in a feature set, at a minimum we expect:

  • Single Sign On / Same Sign On (SSO)
  • Governance
  • Monitoring
  • Protection
  • Entitlement
  • Lifecycle

Conceptually, there are 3 major stages of Lifecycle. I’m lumping creation and onboarding together because they go hand in hand.

  1. Entrance (Provisioning)
  2. Daily Use
  3. Exit (Deprovisioning)

With the addition of Inbound HR Provisioning to Azure AD…. sorry Entra ID (that will take some getting used to), this truly expands Microsoft’s ability to bring Lifecycle to  the forefront of its offering and complete with vendors like Okta and Auth0.

BUT WHERE DOES ENTRA COME FROM MJ?!?!

Okay, I know I ramble a lot but that’s just how I AM….. see what I did there? My thought is that “Entra” is a play on the first stage of Lifecycle: ENTRAnce. I could be way off the mark but to me it makes sense. At the end of the day, all of the features we’ve come to know and love with are still alive a well and Entra is only going to get better with time.

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