News

Azure Active Directory Reporting APIs Hit Preview Stage

• By Kurt Mackie
• 07/13/2015

Microsoft last week announced that its new Azure Active Directory Reporting APIs has entered public preview.

The Reporting APIs provide a means for developers and IT pros to take reports data, as available via the Azure AD service, and put them into other applications. The data can be brought into custom dashboards, applications such as Power BI or Excel, and security information and event management (SIEM) solutions, according to Microsoft's announcement.

The APIs are REST based and can be used with "C#, PowerShell, or any tool or programming language that supports REST APIs with OAuth," Microsoft indicated. The extracted data can be published in text, XML or JSON formats.

Microsoft's API announcement provided a list of the currently supported reports. The APIs can surface "all audited events." They can deliver data on SaaS app provisioning errors. Various user activity data can be extracted. The APIs can be used to track anonymous user sign-in attempts, suspicious user activities, sign-in attempts across different regions, multiple sign-in attempts and attempts to use malware-infected devices, among other details.

Tapping into some data via the APIs will require having an Azure Premium subscription license in place, Microsoft noted. It's not clear from the announcement which reports require Premium licensing, though.

In other Azure AD news, specifically on the mobile device management front, Microsoft announced a replacement for its PhoneFactor multifactor authentication app, which is called "Azure Authenticator."

Also, late last month Microsoft noted that it had updated its Azure AD Conditional Access feature to support a multifactor authentication, instead of just single sign-on access. The Azure AD Conditional Access feature, still at the preview stage, is a way to ensure that mobile devices meet certain IT policies before permitting network access.

The Azure AD Conditional Access preview also now can enforce multifactor authentication for Microsoft's Azure RemoteApp service, Microsoft announced this week. Azure RemoteApp is a service that's used to access applications remotely in virtual desktop scenarios.