Complete Guide to Azure Role Assignment and Management

Azure role assignment is a crucial aspect of managing access and permissions in Azure. You can assign roles to users, groups, or service principals to grant them the necessary permissions to perform specific tasks.

To assign roles, you can use the Azure portal, Azure CLI, or Azure PowerShell. For example, you can use the Azure portal to assign the "Contributor" role to a user.

Role assignments can be scoped to specific resources, such as a virtual machine or a storage account, or to a subscription or resource group. This allows you to granularly control access to different resources.

Before you start assigning Azure roles, it's essential to check your prerequisites. You must be signed in with a user that is assigned a role that has role assignments write permission.

To assign roles, you'll need to have the Microsoft.Authorization/roleAssignments/write permission, such as Role Based Access Control Administrator or User Access Administrator.

If your user account doesn't have permission to assign a role within your subscription, you'll see an error message that your account "does not have authorization to perform action 'Microsoft.Authorization/roleAssignments/write'."

In this case, contact the administrators of your subscription as they can assign the permissions on your behalf. Alternatively, if you're using a service principal, you might get the error "Insufficient privileges to complete the operation."

This error is likely because Azure is attempting to look up the assignee identity in Microsoft Entra ID and the service principal cannot read Microsoft Entra ID by default. To resolve this, you need to grant the service principal permissions to read data in the directory.

Here are the specific permissions you'll need to assign roles:

Make sure you have these permissions in place before attempting to assign roles.

Azure RBAC is an authorization system built into the Azure Resource Manager.

You can use Azure RBAC to define which specific users should be allowed access to Azure cloud resources.

It's an access management system that enables you to assign a set of privileges for each user group.

Azure provides various built-in roles, including a virtual machine contributor role that allows users to create and manage VMs.

You can define high-level roles, such as an owner, or specific roles, such as a virtual machine (VM) reader.

Azure custom roles can also be defined if the built-in roles do not satisfy your requirements.

Data actions can be used to grant access to data stored in a specific object.

A role definition in Azure RBAC is a set of permissions that defines users' actions, such as write, delete, and read.

You can define high-level roles, like an owner, or specific roles, like a virtual machine (VM) reader.

Azure provides various built-in roles, including a virtual machine contributor role that allows users to create and manage VMs.

Azure custom roles can be defined if the built-in roles don't satisfy your requirements.

Data actions can be used to grant access to data stored in a specific object.

Azure RBAC is an authorization system built into the Azure Resource Manager.

You can use Azure RBAC to define which specific users should be allowed access to Azure cloud resources and assign a set of privileges for each user group.

Azure RBAC enables access management for Azure resources.

Azure RBAC can be difficult to manage when dealing with hundreds of role assignments.

Azure attribute-based access control (ABAC) builds on Azure RBAC, allowing you to add role assignment conditions for fine-grained access control.

Azure ABAC lets you filter down permissions provisioned as a part of the role definition and assignment with each role assignment condition.

Role definitions and role assignments are used in Azure RBAC to control access, but it doesn't offer the same level of fine-grained access management as ABAC.

Each role assignment condition in Azure ABAC provides an additional, optional check to a role assignment, adding more flexibility to access control.

A scope is essentially a set of resources with specific access. It's the foundation of Azure role assignment, enabling you to grant the relevant security principal to a certain role.

You can specify a scope at four levels: management group, subscription, resource group, and resource. Each level of hierarchy makes the scope more specific.

The level you choose determines how the role is applied. Assigning a role at a parent scope means those permissions are inherited to the child scopes.

Here's a breakdown of the four levels of scope:

By limiting the scope, you limit the resources at risk if the security principal is ever compromised. It's a best practice to grant security principals the least privilege they need to perform their job.

To assign a role in Azure RBAC, you need to determine who needs access. You can assign a role to a user, group, service principal, or managed identity.

A user is an individual with a profile in Microsoft Entra ID, and you can also assign roles to users in other tenants. For example, if you have a team in another organization, you can grant them access to your Azure resources.

A group is a set of users created in Microsoft Entra ID, and when you assign a role to a group, all users within that group have that role. This is a convenient way to manage access for a team or department.

A service principal is a security identity used by applications or services to access specific Azure resources. You can think of it as a user identity for an application.

A managed identity is an identity in Microsoft Entra ID that is automatically managed by Azure. You typically use managed identities when developing cloud applications to manage the credentials for authenticating to Azure services.

To select who needs access, follow these steps:

Here are some options for selecting members:

Role Assignment is a crucial step in Azure RBAC (Role-Based Access Control). To assign roles, you must specify a scope, which is the set of resources the access applies to. In Azure, you can specify a scope at four levels: management group, subscription, resource group, and resource.

The scope determines how widely the role is applied. Assigning a role at a parent scope makes its permissions inherited to the child scopes. For example, assigning the Reader role to a user at the management group scope allows them to read everything in all subscriptions in the management group.

You can list role assignments for a user, group, or service principal at a particular scope by using the Azure portal's Access control (IAM) blade. This lists the roles assigned to the selected entity at various scopes, including management group, subscription, resource group, or resource. You can also list role assignments for a managed identity by opening the Identity blade and clicking Azure role assignments.

Assigning roles to groups instead of users minimizes the number of role assignments, which is a good thing because Azure imposes restrictions on the total role assignments allowed per subscription.

To make it easier to manage role assignments, it's recommended to assign roles to groups rather than users. This approach reduces the likelihood of a breach by a compromised or malicious insider.

Having a maximum of 3 owners for each Azure subscription is a good practice to follow, as it reduces the risk of a breach.

Here are some key points to keep in mind when assigning roles:

By following these best practices, you can better manage role assignments and reduce the risk of a breach.

To assign a role to a user or group, you need to determine who needs access. You can assign a role to a user, group, service principal, or managed identity, also known as a security principal. This is a key step in role assignment.

A user is an individual with a profile in Microsoft Entra ID, while a group is a set of users created in Microsoft Entra ID. When you assign a role to a group, all users within that group have that role.

You can also assign roles to users in other tenants, and for information about users in other organizations, see Microsoft Entra B2B.

To list role assignments for a user or group, you can use the Azure role assignments pane. This pane shows a list of roles assigned to the selected user or group at various scopes such as management group, subscription, resource group, or resource.

Here are the steps to list role assignments for a user or group:

You can also use the Check access tab to list access for a user, group, service principal, or managed identity. This tab allows you to search for a security principal and view their role assignments at a particular scope.

To list role assignments at a scope, you can click the specific resource and then click Access control (IAM). The Role assignments tab will show you the role assignments at that scope, including the state of each role assignment (Active permanent, Active time-bound, Eligible permanent, or Eligible time-bound).

Conditional Access is a powerful feature in Azure role assignment that allows you to add conditions to your role assignments for finer-grained access control.

You can add conditions to your role assignments if you selected a role that supports conditions, and a Conditions tab will appear.

The Conditions tab will look different depending on the role you selected, but you can use it to add a condition that constrains the roles and principals this user can assign roles to.

To delegate condition, you need to select the Allow user to only assign selected roles to selected principals (fewer privileges) option, and then click Select roles and principals to add a condition.

You can use Azure attribute-based access control (Azure ABAC) to add conditions on eligible role assignments using Microsoft Entra PIM for Azure resources.

With Microsoft Entra PIM, your end users must activate an eligible role assignment to get permission to perform certain actions, and conditions enable you to limit a user's role permissions to a resource using fine-grained conditions.

The following built-in roles can have conditions added: Storage Blob Data Contributor, Storage Blob Data Owner, and Storage Blob Data Reader.

You can't assign a role for a duration of less than five minutes, and you can't remove a role within five minutes of it being assigned.