PODCAST · technology
Entra.Chat
by Merill Fernando
Entra Chat is a weekly podcast hosted by Merill Fernando and delivers practical insights for Microsoft administrators and security professionals through conversations with identity experts who've been in the trenches. Episodes feature seasoned Entra practitioners sharing real-world deployment experiences and Microsoft Entra team members who build the features you use daily. Get the inside track on best practices, implementation strategies, and upcoming capabilities directly from those who design and deploy Microsoft identity solutions. Join us for actionable takeaways you can apply immediately in your Microsoft 365, Azure, and Entra environments.--- Entra.Chat, its content and opinions are my (Merill Fernando) own and do not reflect the views of my employer (Microsoft). All postings are provided “AS IS” with no warranties and is not supported by the author. All trademarks and copyrights belong to their owners and are used for identification only. <a href="https://entra.n
Episodes
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Stolen Tokens, Agents and Universal CAE: What Global Secure Access Adds to Entra ID
A phished and stolen refresh token is one of the most useful things an attacker can take from your tenant. It is a long-term artifact, which is why so many phishing attempts go after it. Alex Pavlovsky’s answer to that attack is a feature every Entra ID P1 tenant already owns. Compliant network…
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Your AI Coding Agent Is Creating Secrets You Don’t Know About
Ask a coding agent to build something that talks to another service and watch what it does. It creates a client secret. Then another one. As Arturo Lucatero puts it, next thing you know you have ten secrets that were created without you knowing about it. At the speed AI is moving, he thinks we...
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Active Directory Security Testing in Maester 2.2
Active Directory is not dead. It is nearly thirty years old, Microsoft is still shipping new capabilities and new telemetry for it, and most of the forests running today will outlive the people currently administering them. What has changed is that you can now test it the same way you test your...
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Microsoft Security Architect: Active Directory Is 10x Harder to Defend Than Entra
At Black Hat USA 2026, Microsoft’s David Weston put three numbers on a slide that anyone still running domain controllers should sit with. The Microsoft Security Response Center went from 80 patches in February to 1,142 at the July Patch Tuesday. The fastest observed breakout time dropped from 98...
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How General Motors Moved 200,000 People to Passkeys
Microsoft starts making passkeys the default in Microsoft Entra ID on 1 September 2026, and retires Microsoft-provided SMS and voice MFA on 1 February 2027. Every organisation with a large, messy population now has to answer a question that has nothing to do with passkey technology itself: how do...
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Microsoft Entra memberOf Retirement: What Admins Must Do
On 3 November 2026, the memberOf operator in Microsoft Entra dynamic membership groups stops working. Nothing errors. Nothing breaks loudly. Every dynamic group, dynamic administrative unit and entitlement management auto-assignment policy that uses it simply freezes in its last known state the...
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Pass-the-Passkey: What Michael Grafnetter's Black Hat Research Means for Entra Admins
Passkeys are phishing-resistant. But that resistance is enforced by your browser, which binds every authentication to the origin that requested it. Skip the browser, and the guarantee weakens. In this episode of Entra.Chat, I spoke with Michael Grafnetter, Principal Security Researcher at...
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From SMS MFA to Passkeys: A Practical Microsoft Entra Migration Plan
Microsoft-managed SMS and voice MFA will stop working on February 1, 2027. That deadline makes passkey planning urgent, but enabling a new authentication method is only the first milestone. In this episode of Entra.Chat, Merill speaks with Jai Maharaj, Product Manager at Microsoft, about the...
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The Ultimate Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access Migration Guide
An Entra GSA migration should not mean throwing away years of useful SSE policy work and rebuilding every application, segment, and rule by hand. Existing configuration carries hard-won intent: which populations need access, which destinations should be blocked, and which exceptions keep the...
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Why Entra Admins Need Microsoft Purview Now
Conditional Access no longer begins and ends with identity signals. Microsoft Purview can now influence the controls Entra administrators are asked to implement. From insider-risk conditions in Conditional Access to inline protection for sensitive data moving toward unsanctioned AI apps. That…
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How Xbox Secures 70+ Entra Tenants Every Night with Maester
Xbox Security runs a gaming-specific Microsoft Entra baseline across more than 70 tenants every night. The scale is striking: about 50 controls, dozens of independently operated game-studio tenants, and one parallel pipeline that checks whether each environment still matches Xbox’s security…
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One Compromised Agent ID Blueprint Can Cross Tenant Boundaries
Microsoft Entra Agent ID uses familiar application and service-principal objects under the hood, but its one-to-many hierarchy creates a different security boundary. A blueprint can be associated with many agent identities. When that blueprint belongs to a third-party provider and is trusted…
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Attackers Are Targeting The AI Ecosystem You Cannot See
AI agent security is not just about attackers using AI. It is also about attackers targeting the agent ecosystem most organizations cannot see clearly yet: MCP servers, agent skills, packages, API keys, prompts, tools, and the identity layer underneath all of it. In this episode, I sit down with...
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From Windows Core to Leading Agent ID: Vince Smith’s Microsoft Story
Folks, every big thing in identity started as somebody’s late-night side quest and Vince Smith has been in the room for a lot of them. In this episode of Entra Chat, Vince (the PM lead driving Microsoft Entra Agent ID) walks us back through a 25-year run at Microsoft: shipping beta products off a...
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Shadow Admins: The Non-Human Identities Hiding in Your Entra Tenant
Not every admin in your tenant is a person. Service principals, app registrations, and the new wave of agent identities can quietly hold permissions powerful enough to own your entire environment and most orgs can’t even see them. In this episode of Entra Chat, we sits down again with Erika…
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How Microsoft Is Securing AI Agents in Entra - Conditional Access, Zero Trust & the "Block" Debate
AI agents can make decisions and act faster than any human — which means your old identity security playbook no longer holds. In this episode of Entra Chat, [host name] sits down with Nikhil, a 10+ year Microsoft identity veteran from the Authentication Stack and Identity Protection team, to…
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The Learn-It-All Career Playbook for Identity and Security Pros
In this episode of Entra Chat, we sit down with Christina Morillo, the Senior Director of Information Security for the New York Football Giants, to explore her inspiring transition from an identity specialist to a top-tier security leader. Christina shares her “ground floor” start at a technical...
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5 Lessons from Rolling Out Passkeys to Millions of Users
Passkeys are one of those technologies that sound simple on paper. Turn them on.Users register them.Passwords go away.Everyone is more secure. But in the real world, passkey rollouts are not just an authentication setting. They are a product rollout, a user experience change, a support change…
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The New Control Plane for Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance
Microsoft had 7 million internal tenants and almost lost control of their environment and your org might be facing the same problem at a smaller scale. In this episode, we sit down with Jeff Staiman, PM Area Lead for Tenant Governance at Microsoft, to break down the feature born from the Midnight...
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What’s New in Microsoft Entra - May 2026: Passkeys, Agents & Cloud Sync
Fabian and Thomas join the podcast to share their extensive experience and unpack the massive wave of updates coming to Microsoft Entra. We talk about the massive shift toward Passkeys and registration campaigns, the impending migration from Entra Connect Sync to Cloud Sync, and the rapidly...
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If You Manage Entra Permissions, Watch This Before Deploying Agents
Microsoft Entra Agent ID Just Went GA Here’s What You Need to Know About Agent Permissions If you’ve been waiting for the dust to settle on Microsoft Entra Agent ID before diving in, the wait is over. Agent ID hit General Availability on May 1st, and in this episode of Entra Chat, Erin Greenlee…
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How to Secure Copilot Agents, Azure DevOps & Defender (+ more) with Maester 2.1 (Full Breakdown)
Maester is back with one of its biggest release since launch. In this episode, we are joined by Sam Erde, Architect at Patriot Consulting and one of Maester’s core maintainers, to walk through everything that’s landed in Maester 2.1. Since the December release, the community has shipped 540 new...
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What an ID Governance Consultant Wishes You Knew About Entra
Identity Governance is often treated as a “nice-to-have” compliance checkbox, but as ID Governance expert Sandra Saluti reveals, it is actually the foundation of a secure, scalable environment. In this technical deep dive, we move past the marketing slides to discuss some of the common real-world...
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Stop Leaving the Door Open: The Entra ID Hardening Checklist Security Experts Actually Use
Microsoft Entra security is evolving and the way organizations think about identity protection needs to evolve with it. In this episode, I’m joined by Sean Metcalf, one of the foremost identity security experts in the industry, whose work has helped shape how many organizations approach securing...
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How to Design Bullet-Proof Conditional Access Policies in Microsoft Entra ID
If you can’t immediately name your break glass accounts and the last time you tested them → you’re already at risk. In this episode of Entra Chat, Microsoft MVP Per Torben walks through the conditional access mistakes he sees even large enterprises making, and the practical framework he actually...
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5 Entra ID Updates You Can’t Afford to Ignore in 2026 (Backup, Governance, CA Agent & Risk Score Exposed)
Microsoft just dropped a massive wave of features for Entra, and the rules of Tenant Governance have officially changed. Join us as we talk to three world-class MVPs about their hands-on experience with the new Entra Backup and Recovery and Tenant Governance features. Our Microsoft MVP guests...
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Finding Every MFA Gap: Testing 250 Million Conditional Access Combinations in Under 20 Minutes
Emilien Socchi, Cloud Security Research Engineer at Storebrand, joins us to discuss CA Insight and AZTier. Two open-source tools Emilien built to find gaps in Conditional Access policies and categorize Azure/Entra roles based on attack paths. Learn how CA Insight evaluates 250 million sign-in...
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From FIM/MIM to Cloud Sync: Complete Identity Journey with Australia’s Top Identity MVP Darren “Doc” Robinson
Darren Robinson, Identity and Zero Trust Strategy and Architecture Capability Lead at Increment, shares his extensive experience in identity governance and administration. In this episode Merill sits down with Darren “Doc” Robinson – Microsoft MVP since 2017, former SailPoint Ambassador and one…
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How to Migrate from Legacy VPNs to Entra Private Access (Real Strategies from a Veteran)
Richard Hicks wrote the book on DirectAccess. Then he wrote the one on Always On VPN. Now he’s here to tell you it’s time to move on from both (and other legacy VPNs). Over the last two years, Richard has helped numerous enterprise customers navigate the shift from legacy VPN to Microsoft Entra...
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Passkeys, Conditional Access, Hard-match updates, GSA BYOD: What Entra Admins Need To Know
I am back home in Melbourne today, and joining me are Nathan McNulty from Alaska and Daniel Bradley from the UK as we dive into all the massive Entra updates that dropped last month. We are breaking down the controversial shift to syncable passkeys , why your Conditional Access policies might...
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We Gave Away Our Microsoft Entra Masterclass Labs → Full Governance, Privileged Access & Agent ID Labs Walkthrough
Hey folks, I have to start with a massive shout-out to Morten Knudsen and his entire team at Experts Live Denmark where I’m just returning from. Organizing an event for over 1,200+ attendees is no small feat, and they pulled it off with incredible energy and precision. It was easily one of the…
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They migrated 40,000 devices to Entra Join in 9 months
What does it take to migrate 40,000 devices to a cloud-native environment in a massive, complex enterprise? For most IT leaders, the prospect of moving away from 20 years of legacy infrastructure is enough to cause a sleepless night. In our latest episode of Entra Chat, we sat down with…
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Microsoft Is Auto-Enabling Passkeys in March 2026
March 2026 is shaping up to be one of the most important months for Microsoft Entra ID administrators in recent memory. Microsoft is automatically enabling passkey profiles in Entra ID, and if you don’t configure them yourself, your tenant will be migrated with default settings. In this episode…
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Automating Governance: The New Standard for Microsoft 365 Tenant Snapshots and Remediation
Governance in Microsoft 365 has always been hard. Not because the tools didn’t exist, but because scale, complexity, and change made consistency almost impossible. As tenants grow, so do the challenges of configuration drift, manual admin changes, and inconsistent environments. For years, admins...
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Mastering Microsoft Entra ID: Real-World Passkey Deployment Tips
In this episode, we sit down with Eric Woodruff, Chief Identity Architect at Semperis, to discuss the reality of achieving a 100% phishing-resistant environment. Over the course of just three months, Eric led a 600-person organization through a complete rollout of passkeys, Windows Hello for...
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Entra Agent Registry: The Corporate Yellow Pages for AI Agents
Service principals worked for static apps, but AI agents are different—they make autonomous decisions using LLMs and require a new approach to identity and security. In this episode of Entra Chat, Padma Parthasarathy, Product Manager for Microsoft Entra Agent Registry, explains why Microsoft...
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Global Secure Access Explained: Real-World Rollouts, Mistakes, and Best Practices
In this episode, I’m joined by Christopher Brumm from glueckkanja to discuss real-world experiences deploying Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access (GSA).We go beyond the docs to talk about actual customer rollouts, scaling challenges, retiring VPNs, and what teams often underestimate when moving…
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Cybersecurity First Principles: Lessons from a 20-Year Microsoft MVP
Nicolas Blank, Founder of NBConsult and a 20-year Microsoft MVP, joins the show to dismantle the complexity around Zero Trust.Most Zero Trust conversations fail because they start with technology. Nicolas flips the script by using powerful everyday analogies (locking your car, protecting your...
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Identity-Centric Network Security: Entra Global Secure Access Architecture & Benefits
Is the traditional VPN dead? In the latest episode of Entra Chat, we dive deep Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access (GSA).Joined by Karen Simmel from the GSA product team and Thomas from the Entra CXE Architecture team, we explore how Microsoft is bridging the gap between identity and network...
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How to Kill SMS MFA in Entra ID Without a Single Script
Louis Mastelinck, a Microsoft MVP and Security Consultant at Proximus NXT, joins me to discuss the critical journey of moving organizations away from SMS-based MFA. We deep dive into a practical strategy for migrating users to the Authenticator app, starting with “stopping the bleed” and managing...
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Extending Microsoft Entra: Logic Apps, Power Apps, and the Art of Tinkering with Entra ID
In this week’s episode Jan Bakker, Microsoft MVP and solution architect from the Netherlands, joins us for a masterclass in extending Microsoft Entra ID beyond out-of-the-box capabilities. This episode is your complete guide to building custom identity governance and lifecycle management using...
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Inside Microsoft’s Entra Tenant: The Internal App Governance Playbook
Khurram, a key member of the internal App Governance assessment team at Microsoft, joins the show to pull back the curtain on how Microsoft manages application security at a massive corporate scale and the rigorous internal security measures Microsoft employs to protect its corporate Entra ID...
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The "Secret Sauce" Behind Microsoft's New MCP Server
Luca Spolidoro from the Microsoft Entra AI Innovations team joins us to unveil the new Microsoft MCP Server for Enterprise. We discuss how this innovation allows admins and AI agents to interface with their tenant using natural language, bridging the gap between LLMs and the complexity of…
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Entra Ignite Recap: Synced Passkeys, Agent ID & The Future of Identity
This week, I’m joined by a stellar panel of Nathan McNulty, Ru Campbell, Martin Sandren, and Thomas Naunheim to break down the firehose of news from Microsoft Ignite related to Entra. We dive straight into the hot debate over synced passkeys versus device-bound credentials and why consumer…
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Zero Trust Assessment: Secure your tenant
This week, I’m so excited to share the inside story of a project I’ve been working on for over a year: the new Zero Trust assessment. I’m joined by some of the key folks from the team: Tarek, who’s leading the charge; Sarah and John, who are crushing docs; and Ravi, who’s owning Intune. We unpack...
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Hacking Entra ID: Bypassing AppLocks & Creating ‘Immortal’ Users
In this episode, I sit down with security researcher Katie Knowles to unpack the hidden layers of identity systems inside Microsoft Entra. We get into real-world attack paths like backdooring service principals, restricted administrative units that can accidentally create unstoppable accounts…
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Hacking Entra ID: Inside the Attack & Defense Playbook with its Creators
Sami Lamppu and Thomas Naunheim, the creators of the Entra ID Attack and Defense Playbook, join me to discuss their incredible 5-year community project. We talk about the most complex attacks they’ve researched, including the “black box” token and PRT attacks, and their shocking findings related…
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I found a bug that could hack ANY Microsoft 365 tenant - Here's what happened
In this episode, I chat with Dirk-jan Mollema, the legendary researcher behind some of the most important discoveries in Microsoft identity security. We go deep into how curiosity led him from tinkering with web tools to uncovering one of the biggest Entra ID vulnerabilities ever found. He shares...
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AI is Coming to Identity Governance! Meet the Entra Access Review Agent
In this episode, I sit down with Alexander Filipin, a Product Manager at Microsoft, to unpack the essentials of identity governance and why access reviews are a game-changer for security and compliance. We explore the pitfalls like rubber stamping that plague traditional methods and tease how the...
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Why AI Is Breaking Identity Security – Experts Spill the Truth!
Welcome back to Entra.Chat! In this rapid-fire Q&A, I’m joined by a team of brilliant CXE Identity Architects from Microsoft, and they’re answering the toughest questions on the future of identity. We dive deep into the security challenge posed by agentic AI that can spawn self-replicating...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Entra Chat is a weekly podcast hosted by Merill Fernando and delivers practical insights for Microsoft administrators and security professionals through conversations with identity experts who've been in the trenches. Episodes feature seasoned Entra practitioners sharing real-world deployment experiences and Microsoft Entra team members who build the features you use daily. Get the inside track on best practices, implementation strategies, and upcoming capabilities directly from those who design and deploy Microsoft identity solutions. Join us for actionable takeaways you can apply immediately in your Microsoft 365, Azure, and Entra environments.--- Entra.Chat, its content and opinions are my (Merill Fernando) own and do not reflect the views of my employer (Microsoft). All postings are provided “AS IS” with no warranties and is not supported by the author. All trademarks and copyrights belong to their owners and are used for identification only.
<a href="https://entra.n
HOSTED BY
Merill Fernando
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How many episodes does Entra.Chat have?
Entra.Chat currently has 80 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Entra.Chat about?
Entra Chat is a weekly podcast hosted by Merill Fernando and delivers practical insights for Microsoft administrators and security professionals through conversations with identity experts who've been in the trenches. Episodes feature seasoned Entra practitioners sharing real-world deployment...
How often does Entra.Chat release new episodes?
Entra.Chat has 80 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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You can listen to Entra.Chat on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Entra.Chat?
Entra.Chat is created and hosted by Merill Fernando.
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