Vlog: How 1Kosmos Can Be An External Authentication Method When Using Microsoft Entra ID?

Hi everybody. Welcome to our blog. My name’s Rob MacDonald. I’m the VP of product marketing here at 1Kosmos, and I’m joined by Vik today.

Vik, how you doing?

I am doing great, yeah.

Awesome.

And just for everyone, Vikram Subramanian. I run solutions for 1Kosmos.

Awesome. And you do a great job at it, Vik, by the way. Appreciate having you.

All right, Vik, listen. Today, I wanted to just have a short little vlog with you about Microsoft. Microsoft has released a new authentication, external authentication method, into its Entra ID platform. And the feature will allow more customers to expand their use of 1Kosmos’s identity-based authentication and passwordless access capabilities, and far more Microsoft and environments while maintaining all of the Conditional Access policies that they’ve built. 1Kosmos as an external authentication method will allow organizations to seamlessly protect Microsoft resources while also still protecting those platforms that fall outside of the Microsoft coverage.

All that to say, Vik, there are many use cases we can help fulfill to help improve an Entra ID investment. 1Kosmos as an external authentication method, while that is a new feature to Entra ID, what is it?

Good question. Many organizations obviously have invested in Entra, and I’m glad that both of us are actually getting that right. It’s not Ontra. It’s Entra.

It’s not Ontra. It’s Entra.

The main use case was that, hey, given that organizations are already invested in Entra, people are already authenticating in Entra and they’re probably using authenticators that are not necessarily complying to requirements that the enterprise has, or not necessarily having the experience that the enterprise has. It is a pretty big change if we tell people to actually move all of their authentication and utilize 1Kosmos as an IDP.

A great use case over here is, and we’ve always been asked by clients is, can we used 1Kosmos as an MFA within our Entra ecosystem? And now, with external authentication methods, we can. And what this provides is the ability for the enterprise to go ahead and introduce 1Kosmos to their end users and slowly start migrating them towards utilizing passwordless in its entirety.

Interesting, okay. That’s a lead into my next question, which is, with EAM, or external authentication methods, within Entra ID, how can one cause most help organizations within that kind of use case?

A great use case is where organizations want to protect their crown jewels, so privileged assets, restricted assets, or restricted applications, restricted transactions. Anytime anything that requires an MFA, you can put 1Kosmos as the authenticator of choice within your Conditional Access policies. Earlier, you were not able to do this. It’s a great feature introduced by Microsoft, and we have immediately jumped and integrated with them utilizing that feature, which means now within the Conditional Access policy, you can select 1Kosmos as the authenticator for when certain conditions are met. And you can also specify what kind of authentication do you want the user to do. Do you want to depend on device biometrics or the superior Live ID that we offer?

Fair enough. With this change to the way in which Microsoft’s offering their Entra ID solution, why is that important not only to organizations, but maybe the industry at large?

See, now this is the increase or introduction of choice. Earlier, within the Microsoft ecosystem, the choices were very limited in terms of who were the authenticators you could use for doing MFA. And now, with the open ecosystem that has now been introduced, 1Kosmos can also be utilized by organizations. There are many organizations, many of our clients who are already investing in Entra, or have invested in Entra, could not leverage 1Kosmos without really making a huge organizational change and were stuck in their implementation. Now, this frees them up. They can utilize 1Kosmos as an MFA solution or as a passwordless solution. And it gives them choice.

And they can also utilize Conditional Access policies. That is very important. Why is Conditional Access policies important? Because everyone has it. Everyone is going to be using it. And now, you can also utilize that for Live ID.

Awesome. That’s amazing.

Vik, I appreciate you swinging by today and going through this quick use case with us on our vlog. I look forward to talking to you on our next one.

Absolutely.