In today’s AI-first world, identity and network access are the first touchpoints for enforcing least privilege and protecting against sophisticated, identity-based attacks—but for many organizations, that defense is fragmented. Siloed teams and disconnected tools create security gaps, operational inefficiencies, and a poor user experience. The Microsoft Entra Suite was built to solve these challenges. As a complete Zero Trust access solution, the Microsoft Entra Suite unifies identity governance, protection, verification, and network access security to deliver consistent, granular access controls across your environment.
The Total Economic Impact™ study of the Microsoft Entra Suite
To quantify the Suite’s impact, Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study of Microsoft Entra Suite. Forrester interviewed four decision-makers and surveyed 119 respondents to form a composite reflecting a global enterprise with 85,000 users and USD28,000,000,000 in annual revenue. Forrester found that with the Microsoft Entra Suite, this composite organization experienced USD14,400,000 in benefits over three years, with a net present value of USD8,200,000 and a 131% return on investment (ROI)—driven by faster onboarding, reduced IT overhead, and stronger security.
This demonstrated value is what drives our continued focus across Microsoft Entra—ensuring organizations can keep pace with evolving security needs and maximize their operational efficiency. The momentum behind these results is fueling the next wave of Microsoft Entra innovation, as mentioned later in this blog and which will be highlighted this week at the Microsoft Entra Suite Summer Camp!
Let’s take a closer look at the findings from The Total Economic Impact™ of the Microsoft Entra Suite, and how organizations are realizing these benefits across four key pillars.
Unify identity and network access with a single policy engine
Organizations today often face inconsistent access policies and security gaps, as different teams configure and enforce policies using disconnected tools, leading to conflicting rules, gaps in protection, and poor coordination. Microsoft Entra Suite empowers organizations to converge access policies, using Conditional Access as a unified policy engine across identities, endpoints, apps, and networks.
With the Microsoft Entra Suite, Forrester found that the composite organization was able to reduce identity-related risk exposure by 30% by enforcing consistent Conditional Access policies and leveraging built-in identity protection, resulting in a three-year, risk-adjusted present value of USD535,000 in security savings.
We went from five engineers managing identity and access management tools to just one. Microsoft Entra Suite unified our stack and freed up resources for higher-value work.
—Chief Financial Officer and Vice President of Strategy in the technology industry
Automate governance and enforce least privilege at scale
As organizations manage more identities and resources, manual and disconnected processes often result in permission creep and increased risk, with threat actors exploiting abandoned or overprivileged accounts to access sensitive resources. It’s critical that organizations ensure only the right identities have access to the right apps and resources at the right time.
Forrester estimates that with the Microsoft Entra Suite, the composite organization reduced ongoing user management time by 80% by automated governance and lifecycle workflows, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted present value of USD4,600,000 in IT time savings.
Onboarding used to take hours. Now it’s under 30 minutes. That’s a massive time savings across thousands of users.
—Head of Software and IT in the technology industry
Improve user experiences
Delivering a seamless and secure experience to all employees—regardless of where they work or what resources they need—remains a challenge, especially when outdated and poorly integrated security tools create friction and inefficiency. By implementing risk-based conditional access and extending self-services password reset and passwordless authentication to all apps and resources, organizations not only freed up IT resources and improved productivity, but also delivered a more streamlined and satisfying user experience for their workforce. Forrester estimates that the composite organization decreased the number of password reset help desk tickets by 90%, reducing annual tickets from 80,000 to just 8,000 per year. This dramatic reduction yielded a three-year, risk-adjusted present value of USD2,600,000 in avoided costs, making it easier for employees to get work done securely and efficiently.
With [Microsoft] Entra Suite, we cut onboarding time by 80%, reduced help desk tickets by 90%, and strengthened security—all while improving user experience.
—Director of identity and access management in the IT services industry
Modernize your security by retiring legacy tools
Legacy security solutions often fail to scale for cloud-first, AI-first environments and can be expensive to maintain, weakening both security posture and operational efficiency. The Microsoft Entra Suite enables organizations to reduce their attack surface and protect against identity- and network-based attacks by retiring legacy tools such as traditional firewalls and VPNs. Forrester estimates that customers modernizing their identity and network access security reduced VPN license usage by 60 percent, resulting in estimated savings of USD680,000 over three years.
We eliminated most of our VPN licenses after rolling out Microsoft Entra Private Access. It’s more secure and far more cost-effective.
—Chief Information Security Officer in the security services industry
Read the full Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study to see how Microsoft Entra Suite helped organizations reduce risk, streamline operations, and modernize access.
Alongside these results, we’re excited to announce several new innovations now in public preview across Microsoft Entra including:
- Group source of authority transfer: Manage on-premises active directory groups in the cloud with dynamic, policy-driven governance.
- Shadow AI and IT visibility: Gain visibility into all software as a service and AI applications accessed by users, derived from real-time network activity monitoring.
- Threat intelligence filtering: Safeguard users from accessing malicious online destinations by leveraging real-time threat data sourced from Microsoft first-party feeds and more than 40 third-party feeds.
- Netskope One Advanced Security Service Edge integration*: Get advanced threat protection and unified management against malware, zero-day threats, and data leaks.
Want to learn more about these new features? Join us at the Microsoft Entra Suite Summer Camp this week to see new demos in action and get your questions answered by our product experts!
Learn more
Learn more about the Microsoft Entra Suite and Microsoft Identity and Network Access.
Learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
*Licensed separately from the Microsoft Entra Suite
