One simple change will save countless hours of lost productivity of millions of enterprise users

Hundreds of millions of Azure AD enterprise users sign-in to different enterprise applications everyday. Whenever they try to open a secure enterprise application, they will be prompted to sign-in if it is connected to Azure AD. They can save time involved in entering the credentials every time by using the “Keep me signed in” checkbox on the sign-in flow. But according to the telemetry collected by Microsoft, enterprise users rarely use the “Keep me signed in” checkbox. Microsoft yesterday announced a new improvement to “Keep me signed in” checkbox for Azure AD users which will save countless hours of productivity. There are more than 500 million Azure AD users. Imagine this improvement saves 2 minutes for each user everyday, that’s about 330 million hours of productivity each month!

Microsoft will replace the “Keep me signed in” checkbox with a prompt that displays after the user successfully signs in. Using the prompt, the user can decide whether to remain signed in or not. If a user clicks “Yes”, Azure AD gives them a persistent refresh token similar to what was happening when they select “Keep me signed in” checkbox.

Microsoft Azure AD will not display this security prompt everytime for all the users. It will use its machine learning system to detect a high risk signin or a signin from a shared device and not display it. And of course, Azure AD admins can choose to hide this new prompt for their users. I’m sure millions of enterprise users will be happy to hear this new improvement from Microsoft.