Require MFA for administrators

  • Article

Accounts that are assigned administrative rights are targeted by attackers. Requiring multifactor authentication (MFA) on those accounts is an easy way to reduce the risk of those accounts being compromised.

Microsoft recommends you require phishing-resistant multifactor authentication on the following roles at a minimum:

  • Global Administrator
  • Application Administrator
  • Authentication Administrator
  • Billing Administrator
  • Cloud Application Administrator
  • Conditional Access Administrator
  • Exchange Administrator
  • Helpdesk Administrator
  • Password Administrator
  • Privileged Authentication Administrator
  • Privileged Role Administrator
  • Security Administrator
  • SharePoint Administrator
  • User Administrator

Organizations can choose to include or exclude roles as they see fit.

User exclusions

Conditional Access policies are powerful tools, we recommend excluding the following accounts from your policies:

  • Emergency access or break-glass accounts to prevent lockout due to policy misconfiguration. In the unlikely scenario all administrators are locked out, your emergency-access administrative account can be used to log in and take steps to recover access.
  • Service accounts and Service principals, such as the Microsoft Entra Connect Sync Account. Service accounts are non-interactive accounts that aren't tied to any particular user. They're normally used by back-end services allowing programmatic access to applications, but are also used to sign in to systems for administrative purposes. Calls made by service principals won't be blocked by Conditional Access policies scoped to users. Use Conditional Access for workload identities to define policies targeting service principals.
    • If your organization has these accounts in use in scripts or code, consider replacing them with managed identities.

Template deployment

Organizations can choose to deploy this policy using the steps outlined below or using the Conditional Access templates.

Create a Conditional Access policy

The following steps help create a Conditional Access policy to require those assigned administrative roles to perform multifactor authentication. Some organizations might be ready to move to stronger authentication methods for their administrators.

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal as at least a Conditional Access Administrator.
  2. Browse to Microsoft Entra ID > Security > Conditional Access.
  3. Select Create new policy.
  4. Give your policy a name. We recommend that organizations create a meaningful standard for the names of their policies.
  5. Under Assignments, select Users or workload identities.

    1. Under Include, select Directory roles and choose at least the previously listed roles.

      Warning

      Conditional Access policies support built-in roles. Conditional Access policies are not enforced for other role types including administrative unit-scoped or custom roles.

    2. Under Exclude, select Users and groups and choose your organization's emergency access or break-glass accounts.

  6. Under Target resources > Resources (formerly cloud apps) > Include, select All resources (formerly 'All cloud apps').
  7. Under Access controls > Grant, select Grant access, Require multifactor authentication, and select Select.
  8. Confirm your settings and set Enable policy to Report-only.
  9. Select Create to create to enable your policy.

After administrators confirm the settings using report-only mode, they can move the Enable policy toggle from Report-only to On.

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