Microsoft Corp. today announced that its long-lived and much-loved identity and access management service Azure Active Directory is being rebranded, and will henceforth be known as Microsoft Entra ID.

The rebrand is part of Microsoft’s effort to simplify its suite of identity and access tools, with Entra ID sitting alongside products such as Entra Permissions Management and Entra Verified ID, which were launched back in May 2022.

Azure Active Directory is a much older product, of course, having been in use for about a decade. In a July 11 blog post announcing the rebranding, Microsoft President of Identity & Network Access Joy Chik said Entra ID has more than 720,000 business customers.

Since creating the Entra brand last year, Microsoft has added additional products including Entra ID Governance and Entra Workload ID, and today it announced two brand new offerings – Entra Internet Access and Entra Private Access. The first is designed to protect access to the internet, software as a service apps and Microsoft’s own 365 apps and resources. The second is an identity-centric zero trust network access or ZTNA service that secures access to private apps and resources.

Azure Active Directory’s rebrand is designed to make it “easier for you to use and navigate the unified and expanded Microsoft Entra portofolio,” the company said.

Chik assured users that nothing else will change except for the name of the product, and that all configurations and integrations previously setup will continue to work as normal, without any action required by the user.

It should be noted that the standalone license names will also change, so Azure AD Free becomes “Microsoft Entra ID Free,” for example.

The same thing applies to Azure AD’s feature naming. For instance, Azure AD Conditional Access will be known as “Microsoft Entra Conditional Access,” the company explained.

Users may not see the changes straight away, as Microsoft will roll out the rebrand gradually. It expects to complete the process by the end of the year.

Photo: Microsoft