New Azure Active Directory features generally available next week

Next week is going to be another exciting one for Microsoft Azure. The team has been working hard on the Azure Active Directory and sure enough it’s about to pay off. Next Thursday, September 15, Identity Protection and Privileged Identity Management are going to be made generally available. As well as the release of the Azure AD Premium P2 SKU.

The most recent blog post from the Enterprise Mobility and Security Blog featured a highlight the new addition to Azure Active Directory thanks to team members Alex Simons, Alex Weinert, and Joseph Dadzie.

The article explains that Azure AD Identity Protection will analyze nearly 10TB of behavioral and contextual data. It will scan through user behavior data, attacker behavior data, threat data, Botnet data provided by Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, and Malware information from the Windows Defender team.

All of this scanning results in collecting Risk Events. This panel will show login issues such as anonymous locations, infected devices, or unsafe networks. It will also reveal the specific users being affected and log that user’s amount and severity of risk events to help magnify persistent issues.

Following up on the Azure AD Privileged Identity Management, Dadzie explained that organizations will be able to see clearly what users have privileges across Azure AD, Office 365, Intune, and more. Furthermore, administrators can reduce any risk of vulnerability by assigning “Just in Time” (JIT) roles instead of permanent ones. The JIT roles can be requested for specific instances and can be limited severely compared to other administrators.

Both of these are rolling out with the new Azure Active Directory Premium P2. The SKU of Azure AD will be continuing to grow over the course of the next year and we’ll be certain to follow it.

Learn more about all of these additions to Azure AD coming next Thursday by reading the full blog post here.