Azure AD Portal: Securely Managing User Access and Data

The Azure AD Portal is a powerful tool for securely managing user access and data. It provides a centralized platform for administrators to manage user identities, permissions, and access to sensitive data.

With the Azure AD Portal, administrators can easily assign and manage roles, permissions, and access to specific resources and applications. This ensures that users only have access to the data and resources they need to perform their jobs.

One of the key features of the Azure AD Portal is its ability to enforce multi-factor authentication, which significantly reduces the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive data. This is especially important for organizations that handle sensitive data, such as financial or healthcare information.

By using the Azure AD Portal, organizations can also implement conditional access policies, which allow administrators to control access to specific resources and applications based on user location, device, and other factors. This helps to ensure that users only access sensitive data from secure locations and devices.

To configure your Microsoft 365 tenant, you have two options: automatic or manual configuration.

Automatic configuration is the default method and is recommended. It involves clicking Authorize Identity360 and following the instructions to add your tenant to Identity360.

You'll be redirected to the Azure AD login page, where you need to enter the Email address and Password of an account with Global Administrator permissions.

Once logged in, you'll be prompted to grant Identity360 access to users and domain details from your Azure AD environment.

If automatic configuration is not successful due to permission issues, you can configure your tenant manually.

Manual configuration involves creating an Azure AD application and configuring it in Identity360.

To do this, click Click here to configure with an already existing Azure AD application.

Alternatively, you can configure manually and skip the automatic configuration altogether.

The manual configuration process involves two steps: creating an Azure AD application and configuring the Azure AD application in Identity360.

To configure the Azure AD application, click Configure manually and enter your Tenant Name, such as test.onmicrosoft.com.

You'll also need to enter the Application ID, Application Object ID, and Application Secret Key of the Azure AD application configured for Identity360.

To add the tenant, click Add Tenant.

Once integrated, you can manage your users in the Azure AD tenant from Identity360 using the All Users option.

Here are the steps to configure your Microsoft 365 tenant manually:

Azure AD Portal Security is a top priority for administrators, and for good reason. Restricting access to the Azure AD portal is crucial to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data.

Microsoft Entra had a loophole that allowed users to access the Azure portal even if Azure AD admin center access was restricted. However, Microsoft has since addressed this issue, and users can no longer access the Azure portal through the Entra admin center.

To further secure Azure AD data, it's essential to monitor user sign-ins into the Azure portal and identify suspicious activity. While the native sign-ins report provides some information, it's not enough to catch sudden hikes or valuable insights.

Here are the steps to restrict user access to the Azure AD portal:

This will prevent non-administrators from accessing the Azure AD portal by navigating to portal.azure.com. However, it's essential to think outside the box and consider other potential entry points that users might exploit.

Restricting users from accessing Azure AD is a crucial step in securing data, but it's not the only thing admins should focus on.

Monitoring users' sign-ins into the Azure portal can help identify suspicious activity.

Admins should be aware of sudden hikes in sign-ins, which could indicate a security issue.

The native sign-ins report in Azure AD provides some sign-in details, but it's not enough to get valuable insights.

Registering your enterprise IDP for the portal is a crucial step in securing your Azure AD portal. To do this, sign in to the portal website as a member of the default administrator role in your organization and click Organization > Edit Settings > Security.

You'll then select the One Identity Provider option in the Enterprise Logins via SAML section. Click the Set Enterprise Login button and enter your organization's name in the window that appears. This text will display as part of the SAML sign in option when users access the portal website.

Users can either join the organization automatically or after you add the accounts to the portal. If you select the Automatically option, users will be able to sign in to the organization with their enterprise login without any intervention from an administrator. Their account will be registered with the organization automatically the first time they sign in.

The After you add the accounts to the portal option requires the administrator to register the necessary accounts with the organization using a command line utility or sample Python script. Once the accounts have been registered, users will be able to sign in to the organization.

To provide metadata information for the IDP, you can use one of the following options. However, it's recommended to designate at least one enterprise account as an administrator of your portal and demote or delete the initial administrator account.

Here are the steps to register your enterprise IDP for the portal:

Redirect URI Restrictions can be a bit tricky to navigate, but don't worry, I'm here to break it down for you.

You can't just add any old redirect URI to your app registration - there are some restrictions in place to ensure security.

You'll need to check out the Redirect URI (reply URL) restrictions and limitations for the details, but essentially, you need to follow the rules to avoid any issues.

In a production web application, it's common to have a public endpoint where your app is running, like https://contoso.com/auth-response.

Make sure to keep your development environments and redirect URIs separate from your production app to avoid any security risks.

You can have separate app registrations for development and production to keep things organized and secure.

Credentials are used by confidential client applications that access a web API, allowing your application to authenticate as itself without user interaction at runtime.

You can add certificates, client secrets, or federated identity credentials as credentials to your confidential client app registration. It's recommended to use certificates from a trusted certificate authority (CA) where possible.

A certificate is considered more secure than a client secret and is the recommended credential type. For more information about using a certificate as an authentication method in your application, see Microsoft identity platform application authentication certificate credentials.

You can add a certificate by uploading a file in the Microsoft Entra admin center. The file must be one of the following types: .cer, .pem, .crt.

Here are the steps to add a certificate:

Client secrets are considered less secure than certificate credentials, but are sometimes used during local app development due to their ease of use.

You can add a client secret by following these steps:

Federated identity credentials allow workloads, such as GitHub Actions, to access Microsoft Entra protected resources without needing to manage secrets.

Blocking Azure Portal access in Azure AD is a good first step, but it's not foolproof. Microsoft Entra had previously allowed users to access the portal through its admin center, even if Azure AD access was restricted.

Now, Microsoft has addressed this issue and added value to Azure AD settings, so users can't access the Azure portal through Entra's admin center either.