What is Identity & Access — Entra ID & RBAC in Microsoft Azure?

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Microsoft Azure

Identity & Access — Entra ID & RBAC

Authenticate identities with Entra ID and authorize actions with role-based access control.

Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) is Azure's cloud identity provider. It authenticates users, groups, applications, and managed identities, and is the front door for single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and Conditional Access policies that grant or block access based on user, device, location, and risk. It is the identity backbone not just for Azure but for Microsoft 365 and thousands of SaaS apps via federation (SAML/OIDC).

Entra ID is the company's ID office that verifies who you are (with extra checks for risky logins), while RBAC is the org chart of permissions: a title (role) granted at a level (scope) automatically applies to everything beneath it. Managed identities are staff badges issued to robots so they never carry written-down passwords.

Key Concepts

Authorization in Azure uses RBAC (Role-Based Access Control): you assign a role (built-in like Reader, Contributor, Owner, or custom) to a security principal at a scope (management group, subscription, resource group, or resource). Permissions inherit down the hierarchy. The standout feature for workloads is Managed Identities — an automatically-managed Entra identity for an Azure resource (VM, Function, App) so code can authenticate to other services with no secrets or connection strings. Privileged Identity Management (PIM) adds just-in-time, time-bound elevation for admin roles.