Require MFA for Azure management

Organizations use many Azure services and manage them from Azure Resource Manager based tools like:

  • Azure portal
  • Azure PowerShell
  • Azure CLI

These tools can provide highly privileged access to resources that can make the following changes:

  • Alter subscription-wide configurations
  • Service settings
  • Subscription billing

To protect these privileged resources, Microsoft recommends requiring multifactor authentication for any user accessing these resources. In Microsoft Entra ID, these tools are grouped together in a suite called Azure Service Management API.

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 where all administrators are locked out, your emergency access administrative account can be used to sign in and recover access.
  • Service accounts and Service principals, such as the Microsoft Entra Connect Sync Account. Service accounts are noninteractive accounts that aren't tied to any specific user. They're typically used by backend services to allow programmatic access to applications, but they're also used to sign in to systems for administrative purposes. Calls made by service principals aren't blocked by Conditional Access policies scoped to users. Use Conditional Access for workload identities to define policies that target service principals.
    • If your organization uses these accounts in scripts or code, replace them with managed identities.

Template deployment

Organizations can deploy this policy by following the steps outlined below or by using the Conditional Access templates.

Create a Conditional Access policy

The following steps help create a Conditional Access policy to require users who access the Azure Service Management API suite do multifactor authentication.

Caution

Make sure you understand how Conditional Access works before setting up a policy to manage access to Azure Service Management API. Make sure you don't create conditions that could block your own access to the portal.

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal as a Conditional Access Administrator, Security Administrator, or Global 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 All users.
    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 resources, choose Azure Service Management API, and select Select.
  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 confirming your settings using policy impact or report-only mode, move the Enable policy toggle from Report-only to On.

Next steps

Conditional Access templates