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The European Union has reportedly opened an investigation into the Entra ID identity service in Microsoft Azure. The investigation is intended to show whether Microsoft sufficiently allows third-party
The European Union has reportedly opened an investigation into the Entra ID identity service in Microsoft Azure. The investigation is intended to show whether Microsoft sufficiently allows third-party services.
The European Union is currently conducting a survey of Microsoft’s competitors. One of the parties addressed is Google. The tech giant itself confirms this to The Register. Google rarely hesitates to express its opinion on Microsoft and doesn’t hold back: “What often happens with Entra is that you get a lot of things from Azure even though that’s not technically necessary.” It’s an art and science that they “We have created it over the years,” says Amin Zavery.
Entra ID is an authentication platform for controlling access to Azure services. The platform was previously known as Azure AD, but Microsoft changed its name last year. Today, Microsoft Entra ID offers a complete suite of security tools ranging from single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to conditional access.
Once you sign up for Microsoft’s cloud services, an Entra ID is automatically created that you can use to sign in. The European Union will now investigate whether Microsoft is overly explicit about its own identification platform for Azure and 365 users and whether it offers enough choice to allow third-party services.
Microsoft itself says it provides APIs that allow users to log in to external services such as Okta. But according to Google, the technical hurdle for linking these external services to your Microsoft account is too high. “Techies can get around this problem, but small businesses or startups may not have deeper technical resources and larger customers don’t want to create risk or doubt,” Zavery said. This makes Entra ID the obvious solution for many companies.
The Entra ID investigation fits into a broader antitrust investigation into Microsoft in Europe. Several small cloud providers have filed complaints with the EU over the years because they cannot compete with the bundled offering of Azure and Microsoft 365. Under pressure, Microsoft decided last year to remove Teams from subscriptions and adjust its licensing terms, but those concessions proved insufficient to appease Europe.
Source: IT Daily
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