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Microsoft Entra Permissions Management Service Now Commercially Available
The Microsoft Permissions Management service, used for ensuring proper access permissions across cloud services, is now commercially available, according to a Thursday Microsoft announcement.
Microsoft Entra Permissions Management is one of three offerings that Microsoft has branded under the "Microsoft Entra" product name, as announced back in May. Other Entra offerings include the Microsoft Azure Active Directory service, plus a new decentralized identity solution called "Verified ID."
The Permission Management service, which is now at the "general availability" commercial-release stage, is a new product that brings together capabilities Microsoft acquired when it bought Cloud Knox Security a year ago. The service, dubbed as a "cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM)" solution, analyzes activities associated with machine and human identities across cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.
Possibly, the Permissions Management service also supports VMware's vSphere cloud services, although it wasn't mentioned in Microsoft's announcement.
The Permissions Management service "detects, right-sizes, and monitors unused and excessive permissions and enables Zero Trust security through least privilege access," according to a Microsoft document. It has discovery, remediation and monitoring capabilities to track activities and the permissions used for access.
Microsoft also indicated that the Permissions Management service is integrated into its "Defender for Cloud dashboard, extending Defender for Cloud's protection with CIEM."
Microsoft charges $10.40 per user per month to use the Permissions Management service, according to its online pricing page. The announcement, though, referred to an annual cost of "$125 per resource." Here's how it was put:
Permissions Management is available today as a standalone solution, priced at $125 per resource, per year. Resources supported are compute resources, container clusters, serverless functions, and databases across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
It's not clear if the per-resource cost is on top of the monthly subscription cost, or if it's an alternative price option.
Apparently, the Permissions Management service is available globally, although Microsoft didn't specifically say so. However, it is available in European Union countries as Microsoft made it compliant with the European Commission's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), according to a comment by Microsoft in the announcement.
Microsoft is offering a free 90-day trial of the Permissions Management service, which has to be requested via a link that can be found in the announcement. It's also planning to answer questions about the service in an upcoming "Ask Microsoft Anything" session, which is planned for July 19 at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time.
About the Author
Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.