Conditional Access templates (Preview)
Conditional Access templates provide a convenient method to deploy new policies aligned with Microsoft recommendations. These templates are designed to provide maximum protection aligned with commonly used policies across various customer types and locations.
There are 14 Conditional Access policy templates, filtered by five different scenarios:
- Secure foundation
- Zero Trust
- Remote work
- Protect administrators
- Emerging threats
- All
Find the templates in the Azure portal > Azure Active Directory > Security > Conditional Access > New policy from template (Preview). Select Show more to see all policy templates in each scenario.
Important
Conditional Access template policies will exclude only the user creating the policy from the template. If your organization needs to exclude other accounts, you will be able to modify the policy once they are created. Simply navigate to Azure portal > Azure Active Directory > Security > Conditional Access > Policies, select the policy to open the editor and modify the excluded users and groups to select accounts you want to exclude.
By default, each policy is created in report-only mode, we recommended organizations test and monitor usage, to ensure intended result, before turning each policy on.
Organizations can select individual policy templates and:
- View a summary of the policy settings.
- Edit, to customize based on organizational needs.
- Export the JSON definition for use in programmatic workflows.
- These JSON definitions can be edited and then imported on the main Conditional Access policies page using the Import policy file option.
Conditional Access template policies
- Block legacy authentication*
- Require multifactor authentication for admins*
- Require multifactor authentication for all users*
- Require multifactor authentication for Azure management*
* These four policies when configured together, provide similar functionality enabled by security defaults.
- Block access for unknown or unsupported device platform
- No persistent browser session
- Require approved client apps or app protection
- Require compliant or hybrid Azure AD joined device or multifactor authentication for all users
- Require compliant or Hybrid Azure AD joined device for administrators
- Require multifactor authentication for risky sign-in Requires Azure AD Premium P2
- Require multifactor authentication for guest access
- Require password change for high-risk users Requires Azure AD Premium P2
- Securing security info registration
- Use application enforced restrictions for unmanaged devices
Other common policies
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 tenant-wide account lockout. In the unlikely scenario all administrators are locked out of your tenant, your emergency-access administrative account can be used to log into the tenant to take steps to recover access.
- More information can be found in the article, Manage emergency access accounts in Azure AD.
- Service accounts and service principals, such as the Azure AD 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. Service accounts like these should be excluded since MFA can't be completed programmatically. 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. As a temporary workaround, you can exclude these specific accounts from the baseline policy.
Next steps
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