Introduction
Last summer, Microsoft introduced a new product, the Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access.
In today’s blog post, I want to delve deeper into this product, which is still in preview, thus not fully refined, and can be found only to a limited extent in productive environments today.
My goal with this post is to familiarize you with Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access, and delve into it technically in the next few posts. Today, we will focus exclusively on theory; the hands-on application will follow from next week on this topic.
What is Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access?
With Covid and the mandatory work-from-home policy in many parts of the world, employees were forced to work remotely, and it’s now a standard in many professions to contribute some work hours from home. At the onset of the pandemic, many corporations faced significant challenges, such as ensuring that employees could securely access internal resources. In most cases, this was accomplished with virtual desktops via Azure Virtual Desktop or Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop, or through a VPN client on the employee’s end device.
Microsoft has sensed the potential and began developing a product intended to replace the traditional VPN client on end devices.
Here, I introduce Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access.
Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access is a unified location in the Microsoft Entra admin center. It is built upon the core principles of Zero Trust. It provides a secure, zero-trust access solution for accessing internal resources without requiring a VPN.
Microsoft Entra Internet Access and Microsoft Entra Private Access are unified under Global Secure Access. It is a client agent from Microsoft Entra that helps to improve the security of the network communication of your endpoint.
Source: Microsoft Learn – What is Global Secure Access (preview)?
Frequently, the two features Microsoft Entra Internet Access and Microsoft Entra Private Access are brought up in relation to the solution Microsoft Security Service Edge (SSE).
Prerequisites
The product is currently still in preview, so the requirements may change upon General Availability (GA), particularly in the area of licensing.
- Global Secure Access Administrator Entra Role
- Preview requires Microsoft Entra ID P1 license
- Microsoft 365 E3 license if Microsoft 365 traffic forwarder profile in use (optional)
- Global Secure Access client installed
Outlook
In the next post, I will delve deeper into the topic of Microsoft Entra Internet Access, discussing its functionalities, pros/cons, as well as providing a hands-on guide on how it can be configured via the Microsoft Entra Portal.
Source:
Microsoft Learn – What is Global Secure Access (preview)?
Microsoft Learn – Get started with Global Secure Access