#AZURE SECURITY DEFAULTS FOR FREE#
#AZURE SECURITY DEFAULTS FREE#

Once you do this, the rules will apply to all users in your tenant, no exceptions. How do Azure AD Security Defaults Work?Īzure AD security defaults are something you need to enable at the tenant level. If you are using P1 or P2 licences you would want to look at using conditional access to perform this (and more) rather than security defaults.

#AZURE SECURITY DEFAULTS FREE#

Security defaults are very much designed for users on the Azure AD free tier.

Requiring MFA authentication when undertaking privileged actions using the Azure portal, PowerShell or CLI.

Blocking legacy authentication protocols - this includes clients that don’t use modern authentication and so don’t support MFA, and older mail protocols like IMAP, SMTP and POP3.

Requiring those in Azure administrator roles to perform MFA.

Requiring all users to sign up for MFA (for free).

This encompasses both Azure and Office 365.Īlong with MFA, security defaults also applies several other policies that make your tenant more secure:

#AZURE SECURITY DEFAULTS FOR FREE#

This is a big benefit for free users and will bring a significant extra level of security.

Previously this would have required either Azure AD P1 licences, or pay per use MFA. There are some limitations around this which will discuss, but this service does allow you to get MFA with no additional cost. One of the big selling points for security defaults is that it brings multi-factor authentication to your users for free.

Security defaults aim to take some of these security rules and allow you to apply them to your free subscription. If you pay for Azure AD Premium licences, you can do lots of things with security rules by using conditional access, but this is not available in the free tier. Security Defaults are an attempt by Microsoft to try and make Azure AD more secure by default, particularly for users of the free tier. Given that, I thought it was worthy of its own WTH article. Security Defaults are a new feature in Azure AD that was introduced in October 2019 however, I have found that not many people are aware of this feature, which can be really useful if you are on the Azure AD free tier.

Azure security defaults