Azure Active Directory is Microsoft's Identity Management-as-a-Service solution, offering seamless access, easy collaboration, efficiency in IT processes and improved security and compliance. In its Release Notes for Azure Active Directory, Microsoft communicated the following planned, new and changed functionality for Azure Active Directory for December 2020:

What’s New

Azure AD B2C Phone Sign-up and Sign-in using Built-in Policy Public Preview

Service category: B2C – Consumer Identity Management
Product capability: B2B/B2C

B2C Phone Sign-up and Sign-in using Built-in Policy enable IT administrators and developers of organizations to allow their end-users to sign-in and sign-up using a phone number in user flows.

Security Defaults now enabled for all new tenants by default General Availability

Service category: Other
Product capability: Identity Security & Protection

To protect user accounts, all new Azure AD tenants created on or after November 12, 2020, will come with Security Defaults enabled. The Security Defaults feature enforces multiple policies including:

• Requires all users and admins to register for MFA using the Microsoft Authenticator App
• Requires critical admin roles to use MFA every single time they sign-in. All other users will be prompted for MFA whenever necessary.
• Legacy authentication will be blocked tenant wide.

Entitlement Management available for tenants in Azure China cloud General Availability

Service category: User Access Management
Product capability: Entitlement Management

The capabilities of Entitlement Management are now available for all Azure AD tenants in the Azure China cloud.

New provisioning connectors in the Azure AD Application Gallery

Service category: App Provisioning
Product capability: 3rd Party Integration

Admins can now automate creating, updating, and deleting user accounts for these newly integrated apps:

• Bizagi Studio for Digital Process Automation
• CybSafe
• GroupTalk
• PaperCut Cloud Print Management
• Parsable
• Shopify Plus

New Federated Apps available in Azure AD Application gallery

Service category: Enterprise Apps
Product capability: 3rd Party Integration

In December 2020 Microsoft has added these 18 new applications in the Azure AD App gallery with Federation support:

• AwareGo
• HowNow SSO
• ZyLAB ONE Legal Hold
• Guider
• Softcrisis
• Pims 365
• InformaCast
• RetrieverMediaDatabase
• vonage
• Count Me In – Operations Dashboard
• ProProfs Knowledge Base
• RightCrowd Workforce Management
• JLL TRIRIGA
• Shutterstock
• FortiWeb Web Application Firewall
• LinkedIn Talent Solutions
• Equinix Federation App
• KFAdvance

What’s Changed

Support for groups with up to 250K members in Azure AD Connect General Availability

Service category: Azure AD Connect
Product capability: Identity Lifecycle Management

Microsoft has deployed a new endpoint (API) for Azure AD Connect that improves the performance of the synchronization service operations to Azure Active Directory. When the new V2 endpoint is used, admins experience noticeable performance gains on exports and imports to Azure AD. This new endpoint supports the following scenarios:

• Syncing groups with up to 250k members
• Performance gains on export and import to Azure AD

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