What is Microsoft Entra Id and How does Licensing Works?

What is Microsoft Entra ID?

Microsoft Entra ID is a service in the cloud that helps your employees log in to and use resources outside your organization. Examples of these resources are Microsoft 365, the Azure portal, and many other software services available online.

Microsoft Entra ID also helps employees access internal resources, such as apps on your company’s intranet and any cloud apps created specifically for your organization.

Who uses Microsoft Entra ID?

Microsoft Entra ID offers various benefits to your organization's members depending on their roles:

• IT Administrators: Manage and secure access to resources.
• Employees: Access both internal and external applications.
• Developers: Build and integrate apps with secure access features.
• Security Professionals: Monitor and enforce security policies.

We can perform the below options.

• Add or delete users.
• Restore users.
• Add or change user profile information.
• Reset or change a user’s password.
• Self-service password reset.
• Assign or remove user roles.
• Assign or remove user licenses.
• Create or delete Azure Entra Id groups.
• Edit Azure Entra Id group information.
• Add or remove members from Azure Entra Id groups.
• Add, remove, or change Azure Entra Id group owners, etc.

More than 2800 SaaS (software as a service) applications, including Azure, Office 365, salesforce, Google Apps, ServiceNow, etc., support single sign-on through Azure Entra Id.

Note. Identity management is also offered by Azure Entra Id for SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS applications.

How does Microsoft Entra Id Licensing Work?

Microsoft Online business services, like Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure, use Microsoft Entra ID for sign-ins and identity protection. If you subscribe to any Microsoft Online business service, you automatically get access to Microsoft Entra ID Free.

Microsoft Entra Id utilizes a licensing system. There are two ways to access Microsoft Entra Id (license).

• Microsoft Online Services
• Microsoft Entra Id Premium Licenses

All the free Azure features are yours if you have an Office 365 or Microsoft Azure license, alternately, you can purchase Power BI premium licenses to access Azure premium features

• P1 premium licenses
• P2 premium licenses

You can get a variety of Microsoft Entra Id features depending on your licensing choice.

Microsoft Entra Id Free: This is a free license. You will only have access to a limited number of features, such as Office 365, single sign-on, self-service password changes, on-premises directory synchronization, and user and group management.

P1 premium licenses: The Premium P1 offers all the free features in addition to some advanced administration features like dynamic groups, self-service group management, Microsoft Identity Manager, and cloud write-back capabilities like on-premises user password resets via self-service.

P2 premium licenses: Premium P2 offers all the free features, and Premium P1 features in addition to Privileged Identity Management and identity protection features.

Licenses for pay-as-you-go features: The Microsoft Entra Business-to-Customer (B2C) license, which offers identity and access management solutions for your customer-facing apps, is another name for this license.

• A standalone Azure Premium P1 license costs $6 per user / per month.
• Azure Premium P2 license cost $9 per user / per month.

For More Details, please refer to What is Microsoft Entra?