Soprano is helping companies prepare for upcoming changes to the Microsoft Entra authentication model.

Beginning 1 February 2027, Microsoft will retire Microsoft-provided SMS and Voice authentication delivery in Entra for most users as it makes passkeys the default authentication experience.

However, organisations with a business, regulatory or technical requirement to retain SMS or Voice MFA will have another option: Choose Your Own Telephony Provider.

Rather than revisiting everything that is changing, this guide focuses on the next decision: if SMS or Voice needs to remain part of your Microsoft Entra authentication environment, what should you look for in a provider, and how should you prepare?

For the complete retirement timeline and background, read Soprano’s Guide to the Microsoft Entra SMS & Voice MFA Changes.

How Do You Choose a Telephony Provider for Microsoft Entra?

Choosing a telephony provider for Microsoft Entra requires assessing whether the provider can meet your geographic coverage, SMS and Voice delivery, security, compliance, commercial and support requirements.

You should also consider how the provider will fit your existing authentication environment, how implementation and troubleshooting will be supported, and whether there is enough time to test the integration with relevant user groups before Microsoft-provided delivery retires.

What Is Choose Your Own Telephony Provider in Microsoft Entra?

Choose Your Own Telephony Provider is Microsoft’s model for allowing organisations with a business, regulatory or technical requirement for telephony-based authentication to continue using SMS or Voice with Microsoft Entra ID workforce tenants through a supported provider.

Under this model, your chosen provider delivers the SMS messages or Voice calls required for authentication, while Microsoft Entra continues to enforce your authentication method policies and coordinate the authentication experience.

Your organisation selects a supported provider and manages its commercial relationship with that provider.

The distinction is important because organisations are not replacing Microsoft Entra as their identity platform.

Instead, they are selecting the telecommunications provider responsible for delivering the SMS messages or Voice calls used within eligible Microsoft Entra authentication journeys.

“Security continuity is key to our ecosystem. As we evolve our authentication practices, we want customers to have clear options that meet their business needs. Soprano’s integration with Microsoft Entra ID workforce tenants gives customers that need to maintain SMS and voice authentication the flexibility to choose the telephony provider that best supports their users and organizational requirements.”

Ankur Patel, partner product manager, Microsoft Security at Microsoft

Who Might Need a Telephony Provider?

Microsoft recommends phishing-resistant authentication methods such as passkeys where they meet an organisation’s requirements. Choose Your Own Telephony Provider is intended for scenarios where telephony remains necessary, rather than as the default authentication path for every Entra customer.

Instead, start by identifying whether there are specific users or scenarios where telephony-based authentication needs to remain available.

• Regulatory requirements: particular environments or workflows may require a telecommunications-based authentication option.
• Business or contractual requirements: existing agreements or operational processes may require SMS or Voice authentication to remain available.
• Technical constraints: certain users, devices or environments may not currently support the organisation’s preferred alternative authentication method.
• Workforce requirements: particular employee, contractor or external-user populations may need a different authentication approach.
• Operational requirements: some workflows may have a documented need for SMS or Voice that cannot currently be met by another authentication method.

Microsoft recommends identifying the user populations with a documented requirement for SMS or Voice authentication before selecting a provider.

That exercise also gives identity and security teams a clearer picture of how much telephony authentication they actually need to support.

What Should You Consider When Choosing a Microsoft Entra Telephony Provider?

Choosing a Microsoft Entra telephony provider involves more than comparing the price of an SMS.

The provider becomes responsible for delivering authentication messages or calls to the users you place within the service, so coverage, security, support and operational fit all need to be considered.

1. Geographic Coverage and Delivery

Start with a simple question: can this provider support the users and geographies you need to authenticate?

For multinational organisations, government agencies or businesses with distributed workforces, that can involve multiple countries, mobile networks and regulatory environments.

Assess where your users are located, whether both SMS and Voice are available where required, the provider’s carrier reach and how it supports enterprise-scale authentication traffic.

Understanding where authentication traffic needs to go gives you a much stronger basis for comparing providers.

2. Security and Compliance

Authentication traffic sits within a security-sensitive workflow, so the provider’s security and governance credentials should form part of the evaluation.

Review relevant security certifications, data-handling practices, governance controls and any regulatory or procurement requirements that apply to your organisation.

The requirements may look different for a government department, financial institution or healthcare organisation than they do for a smaller commercial environment.

The question is not simply whether a provider has security certifications, but whether its controls, certification scope and operating model satisfy the requirements that apply to your authentication environment.

3. Supported Authentication Delivery Channels

SMS and Voice are the core telephony methods supported by Microsoft’s Choose Your Own Telephony Provider model.

Start by confirming which of those channels you need and whether the provider can support them across the relevant user populations and locations.

It can also be useful to consider your wider authentication strategy, particularly if your organisation manages two-factor authentication journeys across several systems or channels.

4. Commercial Model

Once you understand who needs telephony-based authentication, you can start modelling what the service is likely to cost.

Look beyond the headline price and consider expected authentication volumes, user numbers, geographic distribution and how those requirements may change over time.

Depending on the provider, commercial models may be based on users, transactions or another pricing structure, while geography can also affect the cost of delivering SMS messages and Voice calls.

Microsoft also notes that Choose Your Own Telephony Provider uses a routing function deployed within the customer’s Azure subscription, with standard Azure consumption charges applying to that function.

A useful provider conversation should therefore begin with your actual user population and authentication volumes rather than a generic per-message comparison.

5. Enterprise Support

Provider support becomes particularly important under the new model because responsibility is shared across Microsoft, your organisation and your selected telephony provider.

Microsoft supports Microsoft Entra authentication, including one-time passcode generation and validation, and the hand-off from Microsoft Entra to the telephony provider’s endpoint deployed in your Azure subscription.

Your organisation manages the telephony provider integration in its Azure subscription and its relationship with the telephony provider, including the provider account, service availability and SMS or Voice delivery issues.

Ask potential providers about implementation support, ongoing service support, escalation pathways, delivery troubleshooting and their ability to support the regions where your users operate.

Authentication is not an ideal environment in which to discover that responsibilities between suppliers were never clearly defined.

6. Migration and Testing

Finally, consider what it will take to move from Microsoft-provided delivery to the selected provider.

Microsoft’s evaluation mode is designed to let organisations validate that authentication requests are successfully routed to the provider without changing the authentication experience for users.

After the integration is working as expected, teams can enable the provider for production traffic and gradually expand the rollout.

Your migration plan should therefore allow time for provider onboarding, configuration, testing, internal approvals and phased deployment.

The retirement date is the end of the transition window, not the ideal date to begin preparing.

How Does a Telephony Provider Work with Microsoft Entra?

At a high level, introducing a telephony provider into Microsoft Entra involves selecting a supported provider, establishing the provider relationship and connecting it to your Entra authentication environment.

• Select a supported provider: review the available provider options and establish the required account and commercial relationship.
• Configure the connection: deploy the required routing function within your Azure subscription to connect Microsoft Entra ID workforce tenants with the provider.
• Select users and channels: define the users or groups that will use SMS, Voice or both.
• Evaluate the integration: validate routing before changing the authentication experience for users.
• Move into production: enable the provider for production authentication traffic and gradually expand the rollout.

The exact implementation will depend on your organisation and selected provider, but the important point is that this can be treated as a staged deployment rather than a single cutover.

When Do Organisations Need to Act?

Microsoft’s current transition schedule gives organisations several milestones to plan around.

• 1 September 2026: Passkeys become the default authentication experience for users currently enabled for SMS or Voice.
• 18 September 2026: Information about supported telephony providers becomes available.
• 30 October 2026: Choose Your Own Telephony Provider configuration becomes available.
• 1 February 2027: Microsoft-provided SMS and Voice delivery retires for most users.
• 1 July 2027: a later retirement date applies to Global Administrators and external users, while internal guest users remain within the 1 February 2027 group.

For organisations retaining SMS or Voice, the practical timeline should begin much earlier than the applicable retirement date.

Use the available time to identify affected users, document where telephony remains necessary, evaluate providers, complete procurement and configuration, and test with a controlled group before expanding the service.

How Soprano Supports Microsoft Entra Customers

For organisations that determine SMS or Voice MFA needs to remain available for specific users or requirements, Soprano Connect for Microsoft Entra provides a supported telephony option for Microsoft Entra.

Soprano has more than 30 years of experience delivering enterprise communications and supports enterprise and government organisations across multiple communications channels.

Soprano Connect and Whispir have achieved SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 across the approved platform scope, alongside additional security credentials with specific regional scopes.

For organisations evaluating a provider, the aim is to provide the telecommunications delivery and support required to maintain SMS or Voice where it remains part of the organisation’s Microsoft Entra authentication strategy.

Soprano Support for Microsoft Entra Telephony Provider FAQs

What Is a Microsoft Entra Telephony Provider?

A Microsoft Entra telephony provider is a supported provider that delivers SMS messages or Voice calls used for authentication in Microsoft Entra ID.

When a customer uses a Microsoft Entra telephony provider, Entra ID continues to manage authentication policies and the sign-in experience, while the selected provider handles telecommunications delivery for eligible SMS or Voice authentication.

Can I Continue Using SMS MFA in Microsoft Entra After February 2027?

Yes, you can continue using SMS MFA in Microsoft Entra after February 2027 if your organisation has a relevant requirement and configures a supported telephony provider for the affected users before their applicable retirement date.

Microsoft-provided SMS delivery retires for most users on 1 February 2027, with Global Administrators and external users following on 1 July 2027.

Can I Use My Existing SMS Provider with Microsoft Entra?

Yes, you can use your existing SMS provider with Microsoft Entra if it is one of the supported telephony providers.

If your current provider is not supported, Microsoft says you will need to select a supported provider to continue using SMS or Voice authentication after Microsoft-managed telephony is retired.

When Should I Choose a Telephony Provider for Microsoft Entra?

You should choose a Microsoft Entra telephony provider early enough to complete procurement, configuration, evaluation, testing and a phased production rollout before the retirement date that applies to your users.

Microsoft recommends completing migration before the applicable retirement date to allow sufficient time for testing and phased deployment.

What Should I Look for in a Microsoft Entra Telephony Provider?

You should look for a Microsoft Entra telephony provider that can meet your geographic coverage, SMS and Voice delivery, security, compliance, pricing, support and migration requirements.

The evaluation should reflect the users and locations you actually need to support rather than treating telephony authentication as a simple comparison of SMS prices.

Prepare for the Microsoft Entra Changes

For many organisations, the next step will be moving users towards passkeys and other phishing-resistant authentication methods.

For others, specific business, regulatory or technical requirements mean SMS or Voice will need to remain part of the authentication environment for particular users.

If your organisation falls into the second group, now is the time to understand those requirements and establish what you need from a telephony provider.

Explore Soprano Connect for Microsoft Entra to see how Soprano can support SMS and Voice MFA beyond Microsoft’s retirement of its own telephony delivery.

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