Scaling Secure Access Through Integrated Security and Automation

Across government, healthcare, and enterprise sectors, IT leaders face a growing challenge: how to scale secure access for hundreds of thousands of users while maintaining a seamless experience and uncompromising protection. Growth at this scale demands more than additional infrastructure—it requires automation, consistency, and integrated control across every identity, device, and network layer.

Extreme Networks is collaborating with Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft Intune, to help customers achieve this balance. By integrating network access control with cloud identity and device compliance frameworks, organizations can deliver scalable security with reduced operational complexity.

The growth imperative

User populations are expanding rapidly. Governments are onboarding new agencies, healthcare systems are consolidating, and global enterprises are supporting hybrid workforces across multiple geographies. What once served 20,000 users may soon need to support 200,000 or more.

This growth amplifies critical security challenges:

• Maintaining consistent policy enforcement across diverse devices
• Avoiding authentication bottlenecks during peak login periods
• Revoking compromised sessions rapidly to minimize exposure

Automation is key to scaling securely. Integrating identity, compliance, and access controls eliminates friction and manual intervention that otherwise create operational risk.

The technical challenge

High-volume authentication events, such as after holidays or outages, can place extraordinary load on identity platforms. Microsoft Entra ID manages this through throttling controls and rate-limit protection within Microsoft Graph API. When integrated with network access control systems like ExtremeControl, these events must be handled gracefully to help ensure continuity without compromising security.

Modern frameworks such as Continuous Access Evaluation (CAE) further raise the bar, requiring near-real-time enforcement of revoked credentials across connected systems. Achieving this at scale demands coordination between cloud-based identity providers and on-premises or edge enforcement points.

The integration path

A sustainable path forward brings together three domains, identity, device compliance, and network enforcement, through open APIs and event-driven automation.

Key design principles include:

• Throttling-aware architecture: Systems respond intelligently to API rate limits using cached authorizations until validation resumes.
• Event-driven revocation: Continuous Access Evaluation enables real-time session termination without excessive polling.
• Automation-first enforcement: Device posture and identity data are dynamically combined to apply contextual access policies at scale.

These capabilities align with Microsoft’s cloud security frameworks and Extreme’s strength in network automation, providing a foundation for secure growth.

Leadership through collaboration

The organizations leading in this space are those that enable collaboration across identity, endpoint, and networking teams. Rather than relying on a single vendor, success depends on complementary technologies, Microsoft Entra ID for identity, Microsoft Intune for device compliance, and ExtremeControl for network enforcement, working together through open standards.

This collaborative approach reflects Microsoft’s commitment to an ecosystem that empowers partners to deliver scalable, customer-centric solutions that accelerate digital transformation.

Scaling secure access from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of users is both a technical and organizational milestone. By integrating identity, device compliance, and network enforcement into an automated framework built on Microsoft and Extreme Networks technologies, organizations can achieve security at scale without sacrificing usability.

The future of secure access lies in interoperability—integrated, automated systems working as one to enable growth, trust, and resilience across every layer of connectivity.