What is Alira?

Alira is a Software-as-a-Service platform built by Kocho — a Microsoft-specialised identity and security consultancy with over twenty years of experience helping organisations design, deploy and manage identity environments built on Microsoft technology.

Kocho is identity-first. It’s what the business was built around, and over two decades of working closely with Microsoft and Entra, the same challenges kept surfacing across customers — fragmented portals, poor user adoption, invisible licence waste, ungoverned guest accounts. Kocho’s response wasn’t to keep working around those gaps. It was to build something that closed them.

Alira is the product of that accumulated knowledge. Every design decision reflects a real challenge heard from a real customer. It’s the collective experience of an identity-specialist team — built into a platform.

At its core, Alira is designed around one principle: access management should be simple for users and controlled for IT. Whether someone is requesting access to an application, an approver is actioning a request, or an IT admin is reviewing licence spend — Alira makes each of those interactions faster, clearer and more governed.

Microsoft Entra is a powerful platform — but it wasn’t built for end users. The native portals (MyAccess, MyApps, PIM) are functional but fragmented, technical in their language, and difficult for non-IT staff to navigate confidently.

The result is predictable: users raise service desk tickets instead of self-serving, new starters wait days for access, approvers miss requests buried in email chains, licences go unmanaged and costs creep up, and guest users fall outside any consistent governance framework.

Alira is structured around three modules, each building on the last. You can start with Enable and add Pro and Ultimate as your needs grow.

• Enable — the Access Portal. Covers self-service access requests, approvals and application management. This is the foundation every Alira subscriber starts with.
• Pro — adds the Licence Portal. Surfaces Microsoft 365 and SaaS licence spend, detects waste, and brings governance to allocation across your organisation’s structure.
• Ultimate — adds Extended Identities. Governs guest users, contractors and partners with the same rigor as employees — onboarding, project-based access and centralised offboarding.

The Access Portal replaces the fragmented set of native Entra portals — MyAccess, MyApps and PIM — with a single, branded experience your users can navigate without training.

• Users browse and request access to apps, PIM Groups, PIM Roles and Access Packages from one place — no service desk ticket needed.
• Approvers receive real-time notifications in Microsoft Teams, Slack or email — wherever they already work — and can approve or deny with full context inline.
• Every Enterprise App assigned to a user is surfaced in a fast, searchable catalogue, replacing the MyApps portal.
• The portal is fully white-labelled — your logo, your brand colours, your domain. Users see your organisation’s identity, not Kocho’s.
• Pre-configured reporting surfaces request volumes, approval times and access patterns from day one, with no configuration required.

The Licence Portal gives IT and finance teams the visibility they’ve always needed over Microsoft 365 and SaaS licence spend — with governance built in at every level.

• A global dashboard shows total monthly spend, licence allocation and renewal dates across every supported Microsoft SKU and any SaaS licence managed through an Entra group.
• Three categories of licence waste — terminated users, inactive users and duplicate SKUs — are surfaced automatically, with one-click removal directly from the report.
• Organisation Units mirror your business structure, with delegated requesters and approvers per OU so business owners manage their own licence allocation without IT bottlenecks.
• Every licence assignment, request and approval is tracked in a full audit log.

Extended Identities closes the governance gap that exists for anyone who isn’t a full employee — contractors, partners, consultants and guest users who aren’t connected to your HR system and therefore fall outside standard identity lifecycle processes.

• Guest users receive a branded invitation link and activate their account through a guided, secure flow. Access is provisioned automatically based on the project they’re assigned to.
• Guests are grouped into Companies — logical entities that represent a partner organisation or contractor pool — with delegated requesters and approvers per company.
• Projects define what a guest can access. Access is provisioned when a guest joins a project and removed automatically when they leave.
• Centralised offboarding removes a guest from all projects and revokes all access in a single action.

Alira does not replace Microsoft Entra — it enhances it. Every capability in Alira is built on top of Entra’s existing infrastructure. Alira does not hold its own identity store; it reads from and writes to your Entra tenant through standard API connections.

• Access Packages, PIM Groups, PIM Roles and Enterprise Applications are all managed natively in Entra — Alira surfaces them through a better interface.
• Approvals in Alira update Entra directly. There is no separate sync or delay.
• Licence data is pulled from the Microsoft 365 Admin Portal. Alira presents it clearly; the source of truth remains Microsoft.
• Guest accounts created through Extended Identities are standard Entra ID accounts, fully compliant with your tenant’s security policies.