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Azure has begun the Australian preview of its Active Directory B2C product, allowing users to keep data in-country for its business-to-customer identity-as-a-service.
Azure Active Directory B2C is a customer identify access management solution that allows users to connect with an account of their preference for single-sign-on access to applications and application programming interfaces (API).
The solution can utilise custom branding, external user stores and third-party identity verification and proofing solutions.
Azure Active Directory B2C also offers what it calls "progressive profiling" — the collection of a “minimal” amount of user information during an initial transaction, then gradually collects more profile data from users with future sign-ins.
While the solution is generally available worldwide, its data residency options are not — unlike the majority of other Azure services, which tie general availability and data residency together. Until now, options for data residency with Active Directory B2C were relegated to various countries and regions within the US, Europe and Asia Pacific.
By offering the Australian preview, which also sees it adding data residency for Australia, Azure claims that the solution will have faster performance due to being closer to local users and organisations.
For all of Azure’s four Australian regions, Active Directory B2C is available in two premium tiers, P1 and P2 — the latter of which offering risk-based conditional access policies and identity protection reporting.
Regardless of tier, Active Directory B2C is free for the first 50,000 monthly active users. Any additional users will incur a cost of $0.004463/monthly active users at the P1 tier, while P2 is charged at $0.022312/monthly active users.
In addition, a flat fee of $0.042 is charged for each SMS/phone-based multi-factor authentication attempt.
