Azure AD Helps Businesses Authenticate Consumers

A new service in preview under the Azure Active Directory (AAD) brand called AAD Business to Consumer (B2C) Basic offers businesses identity management as a service that can be used in products and services that organizations offer to their end-user customers. The service will require some integration and customization to be effective. While free in preview, businesses with large numbers of end-user customers will need to pay for the service after it becomes generally available.

Service Overview

The AAD B2C Basic service offers identity management and integration of most major consumer identity providers into an organization’s services while minimizing the changes required to application code. An organization might elect to use AAD B2C Basic rather than building and maintaining its own identity management framework.

End-user customers can associate their Facebook or Google identities with the organization’s applications or create a new organization-specific identity. Microsoft accounts are not yet supported, but they will be by the time the service is generally available. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is available at an additional charge. The service is free during the preview, but limited to 50,000 consumers in the instance. While an organization may be able to use Azure Access Control Services (ACS) for similar functionality, AAD B2C Basic provides user interfaces for authentication, whereas ACS does not.