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On February 10th Microsoft announced the general availability of Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365.

Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365, powered by Windows Azure Multi-Factor Authentication, works exclusively with Office 365 applications at no additional cost and is managed  from the Office 365 portal.

Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365 offers a subset of Windows Azure Multi-Factor Authentication capabilities as shown in the following table:

	Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365	Windows Azure Multi-Factor Authentication
Administrators can Enable/Enforce MFA to end-users	Yes	Yes
Use Mobile app (online and OTP) as second authentication factor	Yes	Yes
Use Phone call as second authentication factor	Yes	Yes
Use SMS as second authentication factor	Yes	Yes
Application passwords for non-browser clients (e.g. Outlook, Lync)	Yes	Yes
Default Microsoft greetings during authentication phone calls	Yes	Yes
Custom greetings during authentication phone calls		Yes
Fraud alert		Yes
MFA SDK		Yes
Security Reports		Yes
MFA for on-premises applications/ MFA Server.		Yes
One-Time Bypass		Yes
Block/Unblock Users		Yes
Customizable caller ID for authentication phone calls		Yes
Event Confirmation		Yes

 

To enable Multi-Factor Authentication for other applications, customers can purchase the Windows Azure Multi-Factor Authentication service, which offers a richest set of capabilities, additional configuration options via the Windows Azure portal, advanced reporting, and support for a range of on-premises and cloud applications. Office 365 customers that want the additional functionality can also purchase Windows Azure Multi-factor Authentication.

Multi-Factor Authentication for Windows Azure administrators

The same subset of Multi-Factor Authentication capabilities for Office 365 will be available at no cost to all Windows Azure administrators. Every administrative account of a Windows Azure subscription can now get additional protection by enabling this core multi-factor authentication functionality via Windows Azure Active Directory service. An administrator that wants to access Windows Azure portal to create a VM, deploy a web site, manage storage, use mobile services or any other Windows Azure Service can add multi-factor authentication to his administrator account.

Multi-factor Authentication various scenarios

	Office 365 with Federated Id – ADFS	Office 365 with no Federation – Windows Azure AD only	SaaS application via Access Panel	On-premises Apps	Custom Apps – SDK
MFA functionality available	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Minimum Version of MFA required	MFA for Office 365	MFA for Office 365	Windows Azure MFA	Windows Azure MFA	Windows Azure MFA
MFA available for Web client	Yes	Yes	Depends on Application	Depends on Application	Depends on Application
MFA available for Rich client	Yes (Application password)	Yes (Application password)	N/A	N/A	N/A