Explain Microsoft Entra Business to Business
Business to business communication for your applications and users is essential. You need to work with external organizations without having to maintain multiple identities. That creates the space for Azure Business to Business (B2B) services. And the product Microsoft Entra External Identities, part of Microsoft Entra.
Microsoft Entra External Identities
Microsoft Entra External Identities refers to all the ways you can securely interact with users outside of your organization. If you want to collaborate with partners, distributors, suppliers, or vendors, you can share your resources and define how your internal users can access external organizations. If you're a developer creating consumer-facing apps, you can manage your customers' identity experiences.
With External Identities, external users can "bring their own identities." Whether they have a corporate or government-issued digital identity, or an unmanaged social identity like Google or Facebook, they can use their own credentials to sign in. The external user’s identity provider manages their identity, and you manage access to your apps with Microsoft Entra ID or Microsoft Entra B2C to keep your resources protected.
The following capabilities make up External Identities:
| Type of B2B | Usage |
|---|---|
| B2B collaboration | Collaborate with external users by letting them use their preferred identity to sign in to your Microsoft applications or other enterprise applications (SaaS apps, custom-developed apps, etc.). B2B collaboration users are represented in your directory, typically as guest users. |
| B2B direct connect | Establish a mutual, two-way trust with another Microsoft Entra organization for seamless collaboration. B2B direct connect currently supports Teams shared channels, enabling external users to access your resources from within their home instances of Teams. B2B direct connect users aren't represented in your directory, but they're visible from within the Teams shared channel and can be monitored in Teams admin center reports. |
Microsoft Entra Business to Consumer
When you find it necessary to offer services directly to customers. This can be done as well. Microsoft Entra B2C provides business-to-customer identity as a service. Your customers use their preferred social, enterprise, or local account identities to get single sign-on access to your applications and APIs.
Microsoft Entra B2C is a customer identity access management (CIAM) solution capable of supporting millions of users and billions of authentications per day. It takes care of the scaling and safety of the authentication platform, monitoring, and automatically handling threats like denial-of-service, password spray, or brute force attacks.
Microsoft Entra B2C is a separate service from Microsoft Entra ID. It is built on the same technology as Microsoft Entra ID but for a different purpose. It allows businesses to build customer facing applications, and then allow anyone to sign up into those applications with no restrictions on user account.