In May 2022, Microsoft announced a new family of products and services called Microsoft Entra. The products, which are under the company"s security division, offer online identity and access protection for businesses. Today, Microsoft announced two new products that will be joining the Entra lineup, along with a name change for an older service to fully put it in the Entra family.
In a blog post, the company talked about the two new products. One of them is Microsoft Entra Internet Access. It will provide companies with a Secure Web Gateway that will offer protected access for employees to the internet, Microsoft 365 services, and more. It states:
It extends Conditional Access policies with network conditions to protect against malicious internet traffic and other threats from the open internet. For Microsoft 365 environments, it enables best-in-class security and visibility, along with faster and more seamless access to Microsoft 365 apps, so you can boost productivity for any user, anywhere.
The support for Microsoft 365 access via Entra is in preview right now, while the other features will become available sometime later this year.
The other new product is Microsoft Entra Private Access. As the name suggests, this offers secure access to a business" private apps. The blog post stated:
Now any user, wherever they are, can quickly and easily connect to private apps—across hybrid and multicloud environments, private networks, and data centers—from any device and any network. Now in preview, Microsoft Entra Private Access reduces operational complexity and cost by replacing legacy VPNs and offers more granular security. You can apply Conditional Access to individual applications, and enforce multifactor authentication, device compliance, and other controls to any legacy application without changing those applications.
Microsoft has also announced that the older Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) service, which was included in the Entra product lineup in May 2022, is getting a name change to Microsoft Entra ID. Aside from the change in name, there will be no differences in the product. The transition to the new Microsoft Entra ID name will be completed by the end of 2023.