Microsoft Entra Gets a New Admin Portal, Plus Machine Learning for Access Notices

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Microsoft Entra gets a new admin portal, plus machine learning for access exams

Microsoft is starting to roll out a new Microsoft Entra Admin Center portal, along with other product enhancements announced this week.

Additionally, users of the Microsoft Entra Identity Governance service benefit from machine learning support to inform the access review process when using an access review feature.

Access machine learning reviews and insight
Microsoft has improved the process of reviewing user access permissions in organizations by adding machine learning capabilities. This machine learning capability is available in preview through an Access Reviews feature for users of the Azure Identity Governance service, which is also in preview.

For example, IT pros can enable a “user-to-group membership recommendation” (in preview) from the Microsoft Azure Identity Governance portal for the Access Reviews feature. It will mark users for being granted access when IT professionals use the Access Reviews feature.

When enabled, the user-to-group affiliation feature will recommend denying access to a user if that person is organizationally too far removed from the usual hierarchical expectations for such access. These users are deemed to have a “low affiliation” in such cases.

Microsoft generally describes the Access Reviews feature as an Azure Active Directory feature. However, it appears to be specifically available to users of the Azure Identity Governance service.

New Microsoft Entra Admin Center Portal
Microsoft is beginning this month to roll out a new Microsoft Entra Admin Center portal for “Microsoft 365 and Azure Active Directory” customers.

The new portal will be delivered to IT professionals via a “staged rollout” this month. IT pros will be directed to the new portal “instead of the Azure AD admin center,” Microsoft explained.

The fate of the Azure AD Admin Center portal isn’t entirely clear in Microsoft’s announcement, but it will still be available, apparently. The announcement stated that users of the Entra Admin Center portal can “go back to the Azure AD admin center from a link on the Entra admin center.”

The Microsoft Entra Admin Center has links to various Microsoft Entra products, and this aspect seems to be the main focus of the Portal Switch. However, this will be the portal where Microsoft expects to add new features, according to the announcement.

IT professionals can check out the new Microsoft Entra Admin Center at entra.microsoft.com. It is available for review prior to rental deployment.

Microsoft Entra Change Management
Also this week, Microsoft explained how it plans to announce changes to the Microsoft Entra product. The details are explained in this November 30 announcement.

Microsoft Entra change announcements will be scheduled as follows:

• Semi-annual product “withdrawal” announcements, and
• Quarterly “breaking change” and “feature change” announcements.

Microsoft also plans to describe new product features between these intervals.

New Microsoft Entra product features and changes were also outlined in Microsoft’s November 30 announcement.

For example, Microsoft has indicated that Microsoft Authenticator’s “Number Matching and Additional Context” features, used to ward off “multi-factor authentication fatigue attacks” are now in “general availability”. They actually reached general availability on October 24.

Microsoft will also bring IPv6 support to the Azure Active Directory service. This is expected to happen via phased delivery, starting “March 31, 2023”. IPv4 will not be deprioritized with this change. Instead, the addition of IPv6 support “will allow customers to access Azure AD services over both IPv4 and IPv6 (dual-stack) network protocols,” the announcement says.

Microsoft also announced plans to “retire” Azure AD Domain Services on “March 1, 2023”. Azure AD Domain Services deployments can instead be hosted using Azure Resource Manager, Microsoft argued.

The Microsoft Entra product line
Microsoft Entra is the brand name for a set of Microsoft identity and access management products. Microsoft had launched this new brand image in May, which then included three products. In October, Microsoft added two more Entra products to this product line.

Here is the current list of Microsoft Entra products:

All of these products above are said to be in the “general availability” stage, with the exception of Microsoft Entra Identity Governance, which is currently in the preview stage.