Microsoft is Renaming Azure AD to Entra ID

Microsoft revealed today that it will rebrand Azure Active Directory (AD) to Entra ID. It’s the end of an era.

“To simplify our product naming and unify our product family, we’re changing the name of Azure AD to Microsoft Entra ID,” Microsoft president Joy Chik writes in the announcement post. “Capabilities and licensing plans, sign-in URLs, and APIs remain unchanged, and all existing deployments, configurations, and integrations will continue to work as before. Starting today, you’ll see notifications in the administrator portal, on our websites, in documentation, and in other places where you may interact with Azure AD. We’ll complete the name change from Azure AD to Microsoft Entra ID by the end of 2023. No action is needed from you.”

As part of this change, the standalone license names for this product are changing too. Azure AD Free will be renamed to Microsoft Entra ID Free effective October 1. Similarly, Azure AD Premium P1 will be renamed to Microsoft Entra ID P1, Azure AD Premium P2 will be renamed to Microsoft Entra ID P2, and Azure AD External Identities will be renamed to Microsoft Entra External ID.

We’ve never written about the Entra brand here on Thurrott.com because it’s not really relevant, but this change, well, changes things (as Azure AD is somewhat relevant). Microsoft announced the Entra brand and product line in May 2022, and it originally included three products, Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Microsoft Entra Permissions Management, and Microsoft Entra Verified ID. Then, the software giant later added Microsoft Entra ID Governance and Microsoft Entra Workload ID to the product family, leaving its most venerable product—Azure AD—the odd brand out.

On that level, I guess, the rebranding makes some sense, though the AD part of Azure AD dates back to its on-premises successor, Active Directory (AD), which debuted in 2000 as a new directory service as part of Windows 2000. Yes, AD and Azure AD are separate offerings, but they are very much related, and with Entra pushing forward as Microsoft’s overall cloud offering for identity, secure access, and network access, Microsoft is very much cutting an important link to its past too.

I guess that’s progress. But it feels weird.