Azure AD is now Microsoft Entra ID: what actually changed

Microsoft announced on 11 July 2023 that Azure Active Directory would be renamed Microsoft Entra ID. The change rolled out in phases: relabelling across Microsoft surfaces from 15 August 2023, SKU and service-plan display names on 1 October 2023, and most remaining naming strings by the end of that year.

Nothing technical changed. Deployments, configurations, and integrations continued working with no action required. Licensing, terms, SLAs, product certifications, support, and pricing all stayed the same. Entra ID is the identity service; Entra is the wider family that also covers Internet Access, Private Access, and Permissions Management.

Worth keeping straight: Entra ID is not Active Directory. Windows Server AD, the on-premises directory, kept its name and is a different product with a different protocol surface. Microsoft renaming the cloud service did nothing to the domain controllers in your data centre.

Why it matters

Renames are cosmetic until they are not. Three years on, the split naming still shows up in stale documentation, in certification titles, in job specs asking for "Azure AD" skills, and most awkwardly in security tooling and audit reports that reference one name while your tenant reports the other. When you inherit an estate, check whether "AD" in a runbook means the cloud service or the on-premises directory, because the SSO and OAuth surfaces involved are entirely different. See our Microsoft Entra ID profile for where it sits against other platforms.

Source: Microsoft Learn: new name for Azure Active Directory