Microsoft's external identity offering is evolving: What you need to know about the changes to Azure AD B2C

Microsoft has recently been working on converging Azure Active Directory B2C (AAD B2C) and Azure Active Directory (AAD), its two major identity offerings. Resulting in a more robust and better-supported product.

This convergence not only streamlines management processes, but will also simplify the process of developing flexible authentication journeys (Sign Up, Sign In, etc.).

At the recent Microsoft Build event on the 23^rd May, 2023, Microsoft has announced an early preview of their next generation external identity solution for Microsoft Entra.

As a multiple, global award-winning Microsoft partner, Kocho have been supporting Microsoft’s effort. Getting involved from the ground up with testing and advising on the new product offering.

We’ll be sharing more about the technology and its capabilities in the months leading up to the general announcement of this new external identity solution.

But in the light of this week’s announcement on CIAM, we’re providing this short FAQ to help you understand what’s happening.

If you have questions that aren’t covered here, please get in touch with us, and we’ll be happy to help out.

Frequently asked questions:

Q: What does this mean for the B2C project we are currently investing in?

Microsoft will continue to support AAD B2C, and currently it’s the more feature-rich platform. So it’s the preferred option in most cases, and will be for at least the next 12 months.

Q: Is B2C retiring?

It looks as though B2C as-is will eventually retire, although this is a long way off. We’ll be looking at migrating B2C deployments to CIAM when appropriate.

Q: Will Microsoft develop B2C any further?

Microsoft remain fully committed to support of the current B2C solution. So you can expect continued investment in it around resiliency, scale, and security.

Q: How do we migrate from B2C?

Kocho is working closely with Microsoft to develop recommended migration strategies, and we’ll provide more information on this as soon as it’s available.

Q: How does this compare to B2C?

The CIAM solution will ultimately provide more back-end features (due to the Azure AD convergence), and an event-driven model which will be easier for developers to program.

Currently it does not have feature-parity with B2C, but this will be changing over the next 12 months.

Q: Should we use B2C or CIAM? What factors should we consider?

At the time of writing, we’re recommending B2C for anything but early experimental sites/proofs of concept.

This will change over the next 12 months as CIAM becomes more feature-rich.

Q: Are we able to test-drive this technology ourselves?

If you’re interested in participating in the early preview of our next generation platform, Microsoft would welcome your participation and feedback, and urge you to contact the sales team for more details.

For more information about this or any other topic, please get in touch with our team of experts here at Kocho.