Announcing General Availability of Microsoft Entra External ID

I'm thrilled to announce that Microsoft Entra External ID, our next-generation, developer-friendly customer identity access management (CIAM) solution will be generally available starting May 15th. Whether you're building applications for partners, business customers or consumers, External ID makes secure and customizable CIAM simple.

Microsoft Entra External ID

Secure and customize external identities’ access to applications

Microsoft Entra External ID enables you to:

Secure all identities with a single solution
Streamline secure collaboration
Create frictionless end user experiences
Accelerate the development of secure applications

Secure all identities with a single solution

Managing external identities, including customers, partners, business customers, and their access policies can be complex and costly for admins, especially when managing multiple applications with a growing number of users and evolving security requirements. With External ID, you can consolidate all identity management under the security and reliability of Microsoft Entra. Microsoft Entra provides a unified and consistent experience for managing all identity types, simplifying identity management while reducing costs and complexity.

Building External ID on the same stack as Entra ID allows us to innovate quickly and enables admins to extend the Microsoft Entra capabilities they use to external identities, including our industry-leading adaptive access policies, fraud protection, verifiable credentials, and built-in identity governance. Our launch customers have chosen External ID as their CIAM solution as it allows them to manage all identity types from a single platform:

"Komatsu will be using Entra External ID for all external-facing applications. This will help us deliver a great experience to our customers and ensure we're a trusted partner that is easy to do business with."

- Michael McClanahan, Vice President, Transformation and CIO

Industry-leading identity security provides end-to-end access to applications.

Streamline secure collaboration

Boundaries between consumers and business customers are blurring, as are the boundaries between partners and employees. Collaborating with external users like business customers and partners can be challenging; they need access to the right internal resources to do their work, but that access must be removed when it's no longer needed to reduce security risks and safeguard internal data. In this changing world, even trusted collaboration needs least-privilege safeguards, strong governance, and pervasive branding. With ID Governance for External ID, the same lifecycle management and access management capabilities for employees can be leveraged for business guests as well. Guest governance capabilities complement External ID B2B collaboration that’s already widely used by Entra customers worldwide to make collaboration secure and seamless.

For example, you may want to collaborate with an external marketing agency on a new campaign. With B2B collaboration, you can invite the agency staff to join your tenant as guests and assign them access to the relevant resources, such as a Teams channel for communication, a SharePoint site for project management, and a OneDrive folder for file sharing. Cross-tenant access settings allow you to have granular controls over which users from specific external organizations get access to your resources, as well as control which external organizations your users access. ID Governance for External ID will automatically review and revoke their access after a period of inactivity or when the project is completed. This way, you can seamlessly collaborate while ensuring only authorized external users have access to internal resources and data.

Control what resources external collaborators can access with cross-tenant access settings.

Create frictionless end user experiences

Personalized and flexible user experiences are critical to drive customer adoption and retention. External ID lets you reduce end-user friction at sign in by natively integrating secure authentication experiences into your web and mobile apps. You can leverage a variety of authentication options, such as social identities like Google, Facebook, local or federated accounts, and even verifiable credentials to make it easy for your end users to sign-up/sign-in. External ID enables you to immerse end-users in your brand and create engaging user-centric experiences with progressive profiling, increasing end-user satisfaction and driving brand love.

Design secure, intuitive, and frictionless sign-up and sign-in user journeys that immerse external identities in your brand.

External ID allows you to further personalize and optimize end-user experiences by collecting and analyzing end-user data, improving their user journey while complying with privacy regulations. Our user insight dashboards help monitor user activities and sign-up/sign-in trends, so that you can assess and improve your end-user experience strategy with data.

Accelerate the development of secure applications

Identity is a foundational building block of any modern application, but many developers may have little experience integrating identity and security into their apps. External ID turns your developers into identity pros by making it easy to integrate identity into web and mobile applications with a few clicks. Developers can get started creating their first application in minutes either directly from the Microsoft Entra portal or within their developer tools such as Visual Studio Code. We recently announced that our Native Authentication now supports Android and iOS, allowing developers to build pixel-perfect sign-up and sign-in journeys into mobile apps using either our API or the Microsoft Authentication Library (MSAL):

“A mobile app sign in journey could have taken us months to design and build, but with Microsoft Entra External ID Native Auth, it took the team just one week to build a functionally comparable and even more secure solution.”

– Gary McLellan, Head of Engineering Frameworks and Core Mobile Apps, Virgin Money

Our Developer Center is a great starting point for developer to find quick start guides, demos, blogs and more showcasing how to build secure user flows into apps.

Backed by the reliability and resilience of Microsoft Entra, developers can launch from a globally distributed architecture designed to accommodate the needs of growing user bases; ensuring their external-facing apps can handle millions of users during peak periods, without disrupting end-user experiences or compromising security.

Try it out!

We are currently offering an extended free trial for all features until July 1, 2024!* Start securing your external-facing applications today with Microsoft Entra External ID.

After July 1st, you can still get started for free and only pay for what you use as your business grows. Microsoft Entra External ID’s core offer is free for the first 50,000 monthly active users (MAU), with additional active users at $0.03 USD per MAU (with a launch discounted price of $0.01625 USD per MAU until May 2025). Learn more about External ID pricing and add-ons in our FAQ.

*Existing subscriptions to Azure AD B2C or B2B collaboration under an Azure AD External Identities P1/P2 SKU remain valid and no migration is necessary – we will communicate upgrade options once they are available. For multi-tenant organizations, identities whose UserType is external member will not be counted as part of the External ID MAU. Learn more.

Learn More

Want to learn more about External ID? Check out these resources:

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.

Published on: May 01, 2024

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