MFA for O365

Therese Creed 1

I have enabled MFA through the free Azure that comes with Microsoft 365 business standard. Do I then need to go into each active user in the admin of 365 and select enable? Could someone please explain the difference between setting MFA up through Azure and setting it up through active users.

James Hamil 24,746 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2020-11-26T00:48:06.123+00:00

Hi, do you still require assistance? If not, please mark the answer as verified.

Thank you,
James

1 answer

Marilee Turscak-MSFT 36,851 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2020-11-04T03:04:36.337+00:00

Hi @Therese Creed ,

To set up MFA through Microsoft 365, you can first navigate to the Microsoft 365 admin center. Select Users ➔ Active Users and click on Multi-Factor Authentication. You can enable MFA for all users by clicking "Bulk Update" if you don't want to enable each user individually.

The free Microsoft 365 MFA offers only a subset of the Azure MFA features, and Azure MFA with some of the higher tier licenses offers a lot of additional features such as setting up conditional access to enforce MFA based on specific criteria. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/authentication/concept-mfa-licensing

Hope this helps!
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Therese Creed 1 Reputation point

2020-11-05T05:48:22.243+00:00

thanks Marilee - I have enabled the MFA in Azure AD but do I need to also enable this in the Microsoft 365 admin centre? Slightly confused why MFA is not enabled for some users but enable for others when I did enable it in the Azure AD.

Marilee Turscak-MSFT 36,851 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2020-11-10T22:39:44.2+00:00

Hi @Therese Creed ,

So sorry for the late reply! That is actually super weird if that's happening. The settings should be the same in both and reflected almost immediately from one to the other. They are really equal but the best place to manage this setting is the in the Azure Portal. If you change the status in the Admin Center it should be reflected in the Azure Portal, and vice versa. The only thing I can think of is if your browser cache is causing a delay. It does take a small amount of time to reflect and you need to refresh the page, so I would suggest refreshing the page and logging out/logging back in. Could you send me a screenshot of both portals where this is happening for those users?

Marilee Turscak-MSFT 36,851 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2020-11-10T22:43:23.527+00:00

One other thing to note - If you are using conditional access you should "Disable" all of you users the old way. Conditional Access doesn't flip the enable/disable/enforce flag. If you are doing per user MFA then you need to flip them all to enabled. But if you are using Conditional Access then they should all be flipped to disabled as per user overrides Conditional Access. "Disabled" in that case just means not per-user MFA but MFA via Conditional Access instead. Sorry it's very confusing.

But if you are not using Conditional Access please ignore that note.
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MFA for O365

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