Microsoft Entra ID.

Microsoft's cloud identity service — formerly Azure Active Directory — providing identity, single sign-on, MFA, Conditional Access, and external-identity capabilities for Microsoft 365 and millions of integrated SaaS applications. It belongs to the Identity & Access category of cybersecurity.

Microsoft's cloud identity service — formerly Azure Active Directory — providing identity, single sign-on, MFA, Conditional Access, and external-identity capabilities for Microsoft 365 and millions of integrated SaaS applications.

Microsoft Entra ID is the rebrand of Azure Active Directory, announced in July 2023 and rolled out through 2023–2024. As a product it is essentially unchanged: the same cloud identity, authentication, and authorization service backing Microsoft 365, Azure, and millions of integrated SaaS applications. The Entra brand also covers a broader family — Entra ID Governance (formerly Azure AD Identity Governance), Entra Verified ID (decentralized identifiers), Entra Permissions Management (CIEM), Entra Internet Access and Entra Private Access (SSE/ZTNA). The naming change is operationally important because it appears throughout documentation, MSGraph endpoints (still `graph.microsoft.com`), Conditional Access UIs, audit logs, and security tooling — meaning anyone writing detections, runbooks, or training has had to migrate terminology. From a security perspective Entra ID is the de facto IdP for most enterprises, and its primary attack surfaces are well known: consent phishing, device-code phishing, OAuth-token theft, Pass-the-PRT, Golden SAML against AD FS, and Storm-0558-style key compromise. Conditional Access, FIDO2-only sign-in policies, and Identity Protection are the corresponding defensive controls.

Defences for Microsoft Entra ID typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.

Common alternative names include: Azure AD, Azure Active Directory, AAD.