Manage identities and governance in Azure Flashcards
Administrator roles
Administrator roles in Azure AD allow users elevated access to control who is allowed to do what. You assign these roles to a limited group of users to manage identity tasks in an Azure AD organization. You can assign administrator roles that allow a user to create or edit users, assign administrative roles to others, reset user passwords, manage user licenses, and more
Administrator roles Con’t
If your user account has the User Administrator or Global Administrator role, you can create a new user in Azure AD by using either the Azure portal, the Azure CLI, or PowerShell. In PowerShell, use the cmdlet New-AzureADUser. In the Azure CLI, use az ad user create
Member users
A member user account is a native member of the Azure AD organization that has a set of default permissions like being able to manage their profile information. When someone new joins your organization, they typically have this type of account created for them
Guest users
Guest users have restricted Azure AD organization permissions. When you invite someone to collaborate with your organization, you add them to your Azure AD organization as a guest user
Account Deletion
When you delete a user, the account remains in a suspended state for 30 days. During that 30-day window, the user account can be restored
Account Commands
powershell - New-AzureADUser
Azure CLI
az ad user create
Azure AD roles
Use Azure AD roles to manage Azure AD-related resources like users, groups, billing, licensing, application registration, and more
ole-based access control (RBAC) for Azure resources
se RBAC roles to manage access to Azure resources like virtual machines, SQL databases, or storage. For example, you could assign an RBAC role to a user to manage and delete SQL databases in a specific resource group or subscription
Access rights through single user or group assignment
- Direct assignment: Assign a user the required access rights by directly assigning a role that has those access rights.
- Group assignment: Assign a group the required access rights, and members of the group will inherit those rights.
- Rule-based assignment: Use rules to determine a group membership based on user or device properties. For a user account or device’s group membership to be valid, the user or device must meet the rules. If the rules aren’t met, the user account or device’s group membership is no longer valid. The rules can be simple. You can select prewritten rules or write your own advanced rules
Azure AD
s Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service which provides single sign-on and multi-factor authentication to help protect your users from 99.9 percent of cybersecurity attacks
Tenant
A tenant represents the organization and the default directory assigned to it.
Subscriptions
Resources such as virtual machines, web sites, and databases are always associated to a single subscription. Each subscription also has a single account owner who is responsible for any charges incurred by resources in that subscription. If your organization wants the subscription to be billed to another account, you can transfer ownership of the subscription. A given subscription is also associated to a single Azure AD directory. Multiple subscriptions can trust the same directory, but a subscription can only trust one directory
Users and groups
an be added to multiple subscriptions - this allows the user to create, control, and access resources in the subscription. When you add a user to a subscription, the user must be known to the associated directory as shown in the following image
Adding users
- Syncing an on-premises Windows Server Active Directory
Azure AD Connect is a separate service that allows you to synchronize a traditional Active Directory with your Azure AD instance. This is how most enterprise customers add users to the directory. The advantage to this approach is users can use single-sign-on (SSO) to access local and cloud-based resources.
Use the Azure portal
Use the Azure portal
You can manually add new users through the Azure portal. This is the easiest way to add a small set of users. You need to be in the User Administrator role to perform this function
Security groups
These are the most common and are used to manage member and computer access to shared resources for a group of users
This option requires an Azure AD administrator
Microsoft 365 groups
These groups provide collaboration opportunities by giving members access to a shared mailbox, calendar, files, SharePoint site, and more.
This option also lets you give people outside of your organization access to the group. This option is available to users as well as admins
Assigned Membership
Assigned. The group will contain specific users or groups that you select.
Dynamic user Membership
You create rules based on characteristics to enable attribute-based dynamic memberships for groups. For example, if a user’s department is Sales, that user will be dynamically assigned to the Sales group. You can set up a rule for dynamic membership on security groups or on Office 365 groups. If the user’s department changes in the future, they are automatically removed from the group. This feature requires an Azure AD Premium P1 license
Roles / intro
Azure AD provides several built-in roles to cover the most common security scenarios. To understand how the roles work, let’s examine three roles that apply to all resource types
Owner / Contributor / Reader
- Owner, which has full access to all resources, including the right to delegate access to others.
- Contributor, which can create and manage all types of Azure resources but can’t grant access to others.
- Reader, which can view existing Azure resources
JSON NOTATIONS FOR PERMISSIONS
Owner (allow all actions) * -
Contributor (allow all actions except writing or deleting role assignments) * Microsoft.Authorization//Delete, Microsoft.Authorization//Write, Microsoft.Authorization/*/elevateAccess/Action
Reader (allow all read actions) */read -
DataActions and NotDataActions
Data operations are specified in the DataActions and NotDataActions properties. This allows data operations to be specified separately from the management operations. This prevents current role assignments with wildcards (*) from suddenly having access to data. Here are some data operations that can be specified in DataActions and NotDataActions
Custom Roles
Custom role creation requires Azure AD Premium P1 or P2 and cannot be done in the free tier.
Azure AD Connect
This is a free tool you can download and install to synchronize your local AD with your Azure directory
What’s included in Azure AD Connect?
Sync services. This component is responsible for creating users, groups, and other objects. It also makes sure that identity information for your on-premises users and groups matches that in the cloud.
What’s included in Azure AD Connect? 1
Health monitoring. Azure AD Connect Health supplies robust monitoring and a central location in the Azure portal for viewing this activity.
What’s included in Azure AD Connect? 2
AD FS. Federation is an optional part of Azure AD Connect that you can use to configure a hybrid environment via an on-premises AD FS infrastructure. Organizations can use this to address complex deployments, such as domain join SSO, enforcement of the Active Directory sign-in policy, and smart card or third-party multi-factor authentication
What’s included in Azure AD Connect? 3
Password hash synchronization. This feature is a sign-in method that synchronizes a hash of a user’s on-premises Active Directory password with Azure AD.
What’s included in Azure AD Connect? 4
Pass-through authentication. This allows users to sign in to both on-premises and cloud-based applications using the same passwords. This reduces IT helpdesk costs because users are less likely to forget how to sign in. This feature provides an alternative to Password hash synchronization that allows organizations to enforce their security and password complexity policies.
RBAC ROLES
Owner: Has full access to all resources, including the ability to delegate access to other users.
Contributor: Can create and manage Azure resources.
Reader: Can view only existing Azure resources.
User Access Administrator: Can manage access to Azure resources.
Identify the right scope
management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, and resources
Azure AD roles
Global Administrator: Can manage access to administrative features in Azure AD. A person in this role can grant administrator roles to other users, and they can reset a password for any user or administrator. By default, whoever signs up for the directory is automatically assigned this role.
User Administrator: Can manage all aspects of users and groups, including support tickets, monitoring service health, and resetting passwords for certain types of users.
Billing Administrator: Can make purchases, manage subscriptions and support tickets, and monitor service health. Azure has detailed billing permissions in addition to RBAC permissions. The available billing permissions depend on the agreement you have with Microsoft.
Azure roles
Manage access to Azure resources like VMs, storage, networks, and more
Multiple scope levels (management group, subscription, resource group, resource)
Role information accessible through Azure portal, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, Azure Resource Manager templates, REST API
Azure AD roles
Manage access to Azure Active Directory resources like user accounts and passwords
Scope only at tenant level
Role information accessible in Azure admin portal, Microsoft 365 admin center, Microsoft Graph, Azure AD PowerShell
What are resource groups?
Resource groups are a fundamental element of the Azure platform. A resource group is a logical container for resources deployed on Azure. These resources are anything you create in an Azure subscription like virtual machines, Application Gateways, and CosmosDB instances
Logical grouping
Resource groups exist to help manage and organize your Azure resources. By placing resources of similar usage, type, or location, you can provide some order and organization to resources you create in Azure. Logical grouping is the aspect that you’re most interested in here, since there’s a lot of disorder among our resources.
Authorization
Resource groups are also a scope for applying role-based access control (RBAC) permissions. By applying RBAC permissions to a resource group, you can ease administration and limit access to allow only what is needed
What is Azure Policy?
Azure Policy is a service you can use to create, assign, and manage policies. These policies apply and enforce rules that your resources need to follow. These policies can enforce these rules when resources are created, and can be evaluated against existing resources to give visibility into compliance.
RBAC
ROLE BASED ACCESS CONTROL
RBAC provides fine-grained access management for Azure resources, enabling you to grant users the specific rights they need to perform their jobs. RBAC is considered a core service and is included with all subscription levels at no cost
How RBAC defines access
RBAC uses an allow model for access. When you are assigned to a role, RBAC allows you to perform specific actions, such as read, write, or delete. Therefore, if one role assignment grants you read permissions to a resource group, and a different role assignment grants you write permissions to the same resource group, you will have both read and write permissions on that resource group
What are resource locks?
Resource locks are a setting that can be applied to any resource to block modification or deletion