Microsoft Entra B2B collaboration for hybrid organizations

Applies to: Green circle with a white check mark symbol. Workforce tenants White circle with a gray X symbol. External tenants (learn more)

Microsoft Entra B2B collaboration makes it easy for you to give your external partners access to apps and resources in your organization. This is true even in a hybrid configuration where you have both on-premises and cloud-based resources. It doesn’t matter if you currently manage external partner accounts locally in your on-premises identity system, or if you manage the external accounts in the cloud as Microsoft Entra B2B users. You can now grant these users access to resources in either location, using the same sign-in credentials for both environments.

Grant locally managed partner accounts access to cloud resources

Before Microsoft Entra ID, organizations with on-premises identity systems have traditionally managed partner accounts in their on-premises directory. If you’re such an organization, you want to make sure that your partners continue to have access as you move your apps and other resources to the cloud. Ideally, you want these users to use the same set of credentials to access both cloud and on-premises resources.

We now offer methods where you can use Microsoft Entra Connect to sync these local accounts to the cloud as "guest users," where the accounts behave just like Microsoft Entra B2B users.

To help protect your company data, you can control access to just the right resources, and configure authorization policies that treat these guest users differently from your employees.

For implementation details, see Grant locally managed partner accounts access to cloud resources using Microsoft Entra B2B collaboration.