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The Ultimate Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access Migration Guide
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The Ultimate Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access Migration Guide

The Migration Guide That Saves 80% of Your Deployment Time

An Entra GSA migration should not mean throwing away years of useful SSE policy work and rebuilding every application, segment, and rule by hand.

Existing configuration carries hard-won intent: which populations need access, which destinations should be blocked, and which exceptions keep the business running. Migrate2GSA creates a path to preserve the useful parts while making the migration a deliberate cleanup opportunity.

In this episode of Entra.Chat, I spoke with Andres Canello, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft and creator of Migrate2GSA. Andres demonstrates how the open-source toolkit exports configuration from third-party products, converts it into a common CSV schema, gives administrators an intentional review step, and provisions the approved configuration into Global Secure Access through Microsoft Graph.

The goal is not to configure the product end to end or remove human judgment. Andres describes it as a way to accelerate the repetitive 80%. Conflicting segments default to “do not provision,” existing applications are skipped, generated Conditional Access policies remain disabled, and there is no delete API call in the toolkit.

The conversation also covers greenfield provisioning, backup and restore, reusable consultant baselines, and the unusual development story behind more than 30,000 lines of PowerShell. Andres explains why detailed, published specifications produced better AI-generated code than incremental prompting—and why the intent and edge cases in an open-source contribution matter more than who typed the implementation.

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About Andres Canello

Andres Canello is a Principal Product Manager at Microsoft, where he works at the intersection of modern identity and Secure Service Edge. Over his 15 years at Microsoft, he was a founding member of the Entra Global Secure Access team, helping shape the product before it launched, and has since guided some of the largest identity and secure-access deployments in the industry, from banks and miners to national governments. He’s the creator of Migrate2GSA, an open-source migration toolkit used by organizations around the world, which he built end-to-end using AI-assisted, spec-driven development.


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Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:05 Andres Canello's 15 Years in Microsoft Identity

06:43 A Conditional Access Mistake Admins Still Make

11:29 From Early Customer Pilots to Entra GSA

13:21 Why SSE Migrations Should Not Start From Scratch

18:31 Beyond Migration: Backup Restore and Greenfield

23:27 Export Convert Review and Provision

27:02 How Specifications Made AI-Generated PowerShell Work

35:22 Conflict Detection and the Human Review Gate

39:14 Microsoft Graph Provisioning with Safety Built In

43:35 Automating the Repetitive 80 Percent

46:15 Contributing to Migrate2GSA


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