Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD)
Microsoft’s cloud identity service behind Microsoft 365 logins, renamed from Azure Active Directory in 2023.
Microsoft announced the rename on July 11, 2023; features, URLs and APIs stayed the same. If a company uses Microsoft 365, its staff already have Entra ID accounts, so “log in with your work account” for an internal app or a B2B SaaS usually means connecting to Entra ID over OpenID Connect or SAML, with Conditional Access and MFA applied by IT.
Related terms
- SSO (single sign-on): Logging in once with a company account (Microsoft, Google, Okta) to use many apps, managed centrally by IT.
- SCIM (user provisioning): A standard API that lets a company’s identity system create, update and remove user accounts in your SaaS automatically.
- MFA (2FA, multi-factor authentication): Logging in with two or more kinds of proof, such as a password plus a code from an app or a security key.
