How To Enable Azure File Storage Access with Entra ID Authentication
Share files with utmost security from Azure file storage with Azure Entra Id users using SSO with NirvaShare. Entra Id is commonly used these days in most of the enterprise organizations as they are effective in governing access and providing excellent security.
Prerequisites
Before you begin to share Azure files you should ensure that NirvaShare is installed in your system environment either manually or from MarketPlace.
To configure the storage, please refer to the document below.
Login Profile
Follow the below steps to create a new login profile to integrate with the external identity provider.
- Log in to Admin Console as an administrator.
- Click on Login Profiles from the left menu of the Admin Console.
- Click on CREATE button from the top right corner.
- Under the Basic Info tab, provide a name for the title and an optional description.
Access
- Provide an IP Address or IP Addresses in the IP Address Restriction field.
- Choose the language in the Language field. By default it is set to English.
Note – To restrict access to only certain white listed IP address or a range, please refer to Access Restriction with IP Address
Authentication
- Click on the Authentication tab.
- For the Authentication, select External Single Sign On (SSO) and click on CREATE.
SAML Metadata
For external identity provider integration, you will require SAML metadata from the login profile of NirvaShare. To obtain the SAML metadata for the newly created login profile, follow the below steps.
- Edit the newly created login profile.
- Click on the Download Metadata link.
- This will download the XML metadata file for NirvaShare.
- This metadata file will be required to configure the external identity provider. So please save this file locally for further reference.
EntraID and Login Profile Configuration
We need to create an application SSO access point, i.e., enterprise application in EntraID to integrate with NirvaShare:
- Sign in to Azure Portal https://portal.azure.com
- Open EntraID service.
- From the left menu list, click on Enterprise applications.
To know more, you can also visit Microsoft site HERE.
- In the top menu, click on New application
- In the top menu, click on Create your own application
- Provide a name as NirvaShare-userapp and click on Create
- Once the newly created application is selected, click on Single sign-on from the left menu tab.
- We need to enable SAML, hence click on SAML block on right hand side.
- At this instant, you will require SAML metadata file that was obtained from NirvaShare in the previous section.
- Click on Upload metadata file.
- Select the NirvaShare SAML metadata file and upload.
- Save it.
- Go to the section Attributes & Claims and click on edit.
- Click on Add a group claim from the top menu.
- Select the All groups radio button and Source attribute as Group ID.
- Scroll down and expand Advanced options.
- Enable checkbox to Customize the name of the group claim.
- Provide the name as member.
- Save it.
In the next step, we need to download EntraId’s SAML metadata file.
- Scroll down to the section SAML Signing Certificate.
- Download the Federation Metadata XML file.
- Save the file locally.
Updating SAML Metadata
Go back to NirvaShare Admin Console.
- From the NirvaShare Admin Console, click on edit on the Login Profile that we created earlier.
- Upload the Federation Metadata XML content obtained from EntraId by clicking on Choose File next to Upload Metadata under External IDP SAML metadata.
- Save It.
With this, the required configuration to enable EntraId Single Sign-On with NirvaShare is done. To test this, proceed with the next section to create Shares.
Shares
At this stage, we are good to use the SSO with Azure files. Now we can create a folder Share to share Azure files with EntraId Users using SSO. Refer to the below documentation to create a new Share from Storage. During the Share configuration, ensure that you select the login profile that we created in above section. You can also create one or more shares and assign the same login profile.
Verification
- Go to the NirvaShare Admin Console and right click on the login profile that we created and select Copy Shareable Link.
- Open the link in browser tab. This will redirect to Entra Id for SSO.
- After the authentication, you will be able to access Shares assigned to the login profile.