The Microsoft Entra roadmap is as one would expect, focused on delivering capability from Azure Active Directory. Whilst Microsoft continue to support and provide updates to Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) and its connectors and will for Azure AD Premium customers until January 9, 2029 the Azure Active Directory Premium 2 (P2) feature list continues to expand with capabilities striving for feature parity with MIM. And of course capabilities that have previously been deprecated from MIM.

However not all enterprises are aligned with Microsoft's timeframes let alone the ability to be "all-in" on cloud IDentity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) solutions. There are many reasons for this such as security and control boundaries, regulatory and compliance obligations and bespoke integration requirements.

At Avanade, a pattern we are regularly seeing is customers achieving coverage of a subset of their Identity Lifecycle Management (ILM) and Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) requirements from Azure AD, whilst continuing to deploy/manage on-premise systems utilising traditional ILM and IGA solutions. Our partnership with One Identity and our strategic planning sessions concur that this is a common pattern.

Enterprises still require the ability to perform identity lifecycle management, identity governance and access (including privileged access) management across their heterogeneous directory services, application and identity estates often still extended to heritage and host-based systems.

This is where we with our partner One Identity provide full coverage of capabilities. The ability to modernise where relevant, secure tenured systems and extend ILM, IGA and access management capabilities along with real-time audition, alerting and forensics.

Benefits from implementing One Identity Manager
In our recent webinar, I teamed up with One Identity Global IAM Strategist Robert Kraczek to explore how One Identity Manager can augment enterprises existing investments in Microsoft Identity Manager and enhance zero trust and security controls. In this webinar we explored how the enterprise can benefit from implementing One Identity Manager, including:

• With business-driven governance for identity, data and privileged permissions by consuming pre-existing identity information
• Meeting attestation and recertification requirements by utilizing SOD, risk analysis, role management, peer analysis and mitigating controls
• Quickly providing access data about internal, external and privileged accounts with access to your applications
• Streamlining the management and security of privileges across the enterprise, including application access and privileged access
• Unifying access requests policies for enterprise provisioning and SaaS applications
• Accelerating the deployment of new applications via Application Governance
• Extending integration to SaaS offerings in addition to on premise and private cloud capabilities giving organizations a modern choice to augment MIM
• Seamless PAM and Access Management capabilities via product integrations

With Avanade’s strong relationship with One Identity, we can help you design and implement One Identity Manager to provide an integrated solution for identity governance and administration across both on-premises and cloud systems. This will enable you to maintain control over your on-premises and cloud platforms to streamline processes, improve security, and reduce costs associated with managing your identity estate.

With the increasing sophistication of cyber-attacks, how can you be sure your business-critical hybrid infrastructure and systems are protected? Avanade, in partnership with Quest, can help you assess your current environment, identify vulnerabilities and plan to put the systems and practices in place to protect your organization.

To listen to the webinar in full, please click here or find out more information on how to get started.