Microsoft Entra delivers increased transparency

Seventy-five percent of cybersecurity professionals say the current threat landscape is the most challenging it has been in the last five years, according to the 2023 ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study. You’re probably on the hook to secure access for your organization – preventing identity attacks and securing least privilege access. And we know it’s intense.

One of the ways we strive to assist you is by providing accurate, reliable, and timely information to monitor and optimize the strength of your identity and network access security posture. This transparency gives you visibility that’s necessary to assess performance, tenant health, and your plan for improvements.

In 2024, we’ve released a series of innovations reinforcing our commitment to transparency. This blog recaps these improvements for you in three parts: 

1. Transparency in updates: Helping you know what’s new and coming soon for Microsoft Entra; 
2. Transparency in adoption: Providing recommendations and license utilization insights; and 
3. Transparency in operations: Tailored insights on SLA performance, scenario health, and sign-ins.  

Plus, all features highlighted in this blog are demonstrated in our video, Trust via Transparency.

I hope these added capabilities help maximize the value you receive from Microsoft Entra as you consider, deploy, and measure the progress of your Zero Trust approach.   

Transparency in updates

In the world of technology, change is constant. In 2023, we released over 100 Microsoft Entra updates and new capabilities and communicated this information across announcements, quarterly blogs, and multiple docs locations. Our first investment area of transparency aims to streamline this communication, helping you find and filter the product update information most relevant to you. 

What’s New hub in Microsoft Entra admin center

”What’s New” in Microsoft Entra gives a clear and complete view of Entra product innovation so you can stay informed, evaluate the latest innovations, and eliminate the need to manually track updates. Product updates are categorized into Roadmap and Change Announcements. The roadmap includes public previews and recent general availability releases, while Change Announcements detail modifications to existing features. 

Learn more: Introducing "What's New" in Microsoft Entra - Microsoft Community Hub

Transparency in adoption

The second investment area, transparency in adoption, focuses on helping you get more value from your Microsoft Entra licenses, giving you visibility to intelligent recommendations for improving configurations and protecting your organization.

Microsoft Entra license utilization insights

Microsoft Entra license utilization insights help you optimize your Entra licenses, as well as stay compliant by getting insights into the current usage. Today, you can see usage and licenses for Entra ID capabilities such as Conditional Access and risk-based Conditional Access. In the future, we will expand the license utilization insights to other products in the Microsoft Entra product line. 

Learn more: Introducing Microsoft Entra license utilization insights - Microsoft Community Hub

Microsoft Entra recommendations

Microsoft Entra recommendations can serve as a trusted advisor for enhancing your security posture and improving employee productivity. With Microsoft Entra recommendations, you get personalized and actionable insights based on best practices and industry standards to help you secure your organization. Plus, we’ve made updates to Identity Secure Score, which you can find on the Microsoft Entra recommendations blade.

Learn more: Introducing new and upcoming Entra Recommendations to enhance security and productivity - Microsoft Community Hub 

Transparency in operations

Transparency in operations focuses on what we're doing to help customers see how available and resilient Microsoft Entra really is, to hold us accountable when issues arise so we can keep improving, and to understand when they have actions to take within their tenant to improve its health. Let’s look at recently announced functionality in reporting, health, and monitoring:

Tenant-level SLA reporting

Monthly tenant-level SLA reporting enables you to monitor your tenant's performance against our Entra ID SLA promise of 99.99% availability in authenticating users and issuing tokens within your tenant.

Learn more: Tenant health transparency and observability - Microsoft Community Hub

Precomputed health metric streams

These new health metrics isolate relevant signals from activity logs and provide pre-computed, low-latency aggregates every 15 minutes for specific high-value observability scenarios. The first scenarios we’ve enabled are multifactor authentication (MFA), sign-ins for managed or compliant devices, and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) sign-ins. We're starting with authentication-related scenarios because they are mission-critical to all our customers, but other scenarios in areas like entitlement management, directory configuration, and app health will be added in time, along with intelligent alerting capabilities in response to anomalous patterns in the data.  

Learn more: Tenant health transparency and observability - Microsoft Community Hub

Copilot-assisted assessments

As our third example of our commitment to transparency in operations, we can help you understand how users interact with your organization's resources. Microsoft Copilot for Security is embedded in Microsoft Entra so you can more efficiently assess identities and access, plus investigate and resolve identity risks and even complete complex tasks. A great example of this assistance is asking Copilot to give you sign-in logs for a specific user for a specific amount of time, saving you the reporting time.

Learn more: Microsoft Entra adds identity skills to Copilot for Security - Microsoft Community Hub

Tell us what you think

For my team, transparency isn’t a buzzword; it’s our commitment. As we continue to enhance Microsoft Entra, earning your trust through transparency remains our guiding star. 

We look forward to you trying these new capabilities and hopefully making them part of your ongoing experience to reduce complexity and effectively manage your identity and network access security solutions. I’d be happy to hear your feedback and ideas, either in the comments below or via the “Provide Feedback” link on the Microsoft Entra admin center home page.

Best regards,

Shobhit Sahay

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