HID DigitalPersona vs. Microsoft Entra ID

During the onboarding process, remote workers can enroll their fingerprints or create secure PINs. This eliminates the need for complicated passwords and enables them to safely access company resources and critical apps from remote locations. HID DigitalPersona's robust authentication techniques and access control features can assist you in adhering to data security laws.

Incentivized

For one, a significant factor for us is that it is integrated with HelloID, which gives us, as the IT department, a lot of time back because we don’t need to create user accounts manually. It is great for the roles we have defined, as they can be used repeatedly. A great feature is that guest accounts can be created for external users; we only need to be in a closed area of your domain.

Incentivized

• Super fast to recognize fingerprint and authenticate .
• Accurate with a wide area of fingerprint. Most windows laptops with built in fingerprint scanners only recognize a small area of print.
• Units are inexpensive.
• Quick and easy to install server software and client hardware.
• When workstations were upgraded from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 the software continued working flawlessly.

Incentivized

• It addresses the issue of identity management very well with respect to putting in that multi authentication.
• It can also support with respect to we can push these policies into another product that is not Microsoft, but it needs that SSO so we can have one account going into multi different accounts. I think that's the biggest pros and the easy use of Microsoft 365 also is one of those pros also in terms of administration.

Incentivized

• Multiple domains - DigitalPersona struggles with multiple domains. Since the solution is licensed per domain, migrating users between domains can be troublesome to keep licensed. Additionally, migrating to a new domain removes the AD leaf objects that store all digital persona information, essentially wiping out and credentials or other stored information.
• Password change - DigitalPersona can be confusing to update when a stored password for a website is updated. The password is entered, and then the user is redirected to the websites password change page. Users must then authenticate with a Digital persona credential again before being prompted by Digital Persona to update the password. If the user is allowed to change the password manually through the websites page, this will lead to what is stored in Digital Persona being out of sync with the new password, and eventually account lockouts.
• Terminal Server - DigitalPersona has performance issues when utilized on a high-traffic terminal server. Often it causes big CPU spikes as well as hanging sessions upon disconnect.

Incentivized

• Well, I'm an active ad admin, so there's a lot of features in active directory that Entra ID seems to be just adding now. We're kind of figuring out that the policies are different than Entra ID that they were in active directory and we're finding other products to do that, like Azure policy. Some things I'm used to seeing in identity products or like active directory aren't in Entra iID, but are doing good job of managing stuff that it does so far.

Incentivized

It is wonderful for multifactor authentication and gives us many options for what we use to authenticate. All of our users use it and it is engrained into our group policies and people would be very disappointed if it went away.

Incentivized

Entra ID is a vital part of our Identity management/administration. With the integrations it has to other Microsoft products, setup and configuration is a breeze. Additionally, Microsoft has been around a long time and have the resources to ensure this product is stable and secure for many years to come. We know it will evolve with time to provide us what we need as technology changes.

Incentivized

I think there are still fundamental enhancements needed to be added to the management consoles and I think there ought to be a Centralized, Windows Based "Thick" Management Application instead of individual utilities which vary from MMCs, Scripts, Wizards, etc.

Incentivized

Very easily usable. It could be easier to use. Implementation was kind of tricky. We do run a hybrid environment, so we're syncing a local active directory instance with Entra ID, so that could be a little tricky. But outside of that, if you're not running a hybrid deployment or a version of Entra ID usually, it's pretty straightforward.

Incentivized

There has been a handful of outages but they have been either minimal or rarely severe

Incentivized

I could probably rate this a 10 but I'm always conservative on giving out perfect scored bt performance has not been a problem for us using Entra ID.

Incentivized

Extremely poor; I've never encountered such. Professional Services completely dropped us for months. Crossmatch tech support seems like it has 3 techs tops! No response to emails, calls, the absolute worst! I will never recommend DP to anyone.

Incentivized

Microsoft has offered Azure Active Directory as a solution for a couple of decades now, so they have seen and anticipated almost any issue that an organization may face and can therefore help. The cloud offering of Azure Active Directory offers some additional "self healing" or monitoring services that can minimize the need for a service call. However, as with most large companies supporting a fast growing market, there may be some gaps in service knowledge (and particularly processing) from the front line / tier one staff as they follow a corporate script at first contact.

Incentivized

Most training was internally produced

Incentivized

Could use tools to audit license usage at a more granular level as to allow an administrator to free up licenses from users whom seldom use their biometrics to login.

Incentivized

Make sure you use a good partner. Our implementation was a bit longer and more problematic than we expected. Our partner got it done, but, in my opinion, some of their inexperience and staffing issues were evident.

Incentivized

We evaluated Cisco DUO but ultimately chose HID because of their support for biometrics. With DUO every user would have to have the authentication app on their personal phone and pull it out each time they had to log in. We definitely did not want this for our frontline staff as it would slow the process way down

Incentivized

Microsoft Entra ID is not as stand-alone product as competitors like Okta. It may lack some of the features that competing products have but on the other hand it integrates both technically and license wise with other Microsoft cloud services and is easy to deploy. It is also the easiest way to extend identity management to the cloud if you already have Microsoft Active Directory in use.

Incentivized

Scalability is pretty trival for Entra ID. It's not difficult to manage a few or many accounts.

Incentivized

• Provides a quick one finger authentication\log-on.
• Logging onto a machine that is used by several other users, such as in retail is no problem because the DigitalPersona software does a switch user function instead of logging out the other user.
• One negative that was apparent immediately after installing the DigitalPersona software was that users very easily forgot their Windows passwords because of the one finger log-on.

Incentivized

• I don't know if I can really quantify that. It's one of those products that just exists and so there's not a whole lot of changes that we need to make with the product. And so I guess in terms of value, what we get is we don't have to worry about the identity management piece. We know that that's taken care of.

Incentivized