Grant and request tenant-wide visibility

A user with the Microsoft Entra role of Global Administrator might have tenant-wide responsibilities, but lack the Azure permissions to view that organization-wide information in Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Permission elevation is required because Microsoft Entra role assignments don't grant access to Azure resources.

Grant tenant-wide permissions to yourself

To assign yourself tenant-level permissions:

  1. If your organization manages resource access with Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management (PIM), or any other PIM tool, the global administrator role must be active for the user.

  2. As a Global Administrator user without an assignment on the root management group of the tenant, open Defender for Cloud's Overview page and select the tenant-wide visibility link in the banner.

    Enable tenant-level permissions in Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

  3. Select the new Azure role to be assigned.

    Form for defining the tenant-level permissions to be assigned to your user.

    Tip

    Generally, the Security Admin role is required to apply policies on the root level, while Security Reader will suffice to provide tenant-level visibility. For more information about the permissions granted by these roles, see the Security Admin built-in role description or the Security Reader built-in role description.

    For differences between these roles specific to Defender for Cloud, see the table in Roles and allowed actions.

    The organizational-wide view is achieved by granting roles on the root management group level of the tenant.

  4. Sign out of the Azure portal, and then log back in again.

  5. Once you have elevated access, open or refresh Microsoft Defender for Cloud to verify you have visibility into all subscriptions under your Microsoft Entra tenant.

The process of assigning yourself tenant-level permissions, performs many operations automatically for you:

  • The user's permissions are temporarily elevated.

  • Utilizing the new permissions, the user is assigned to the desired Azure RBAC role on the root management group.

  • The elevated permissions are removed.

For more information of the Microsoft Entra elevation process, see Elevate access to manage all Azure subscriptions and management groups.

Request tenant-wide permissions when yours are insufficient

When you navigate to Defender for Cloud, you might see a banner that alerts you to the fact that your view is limited. If you see this banner, select it to send a request to the global administrator for your organization. In the request, you can include the role you'd like to be assigned and the global administrator will make a decision about which role to grant.

It's the global administrator's decision whether to accept or reject these requests.

Important

You can only submit one request every seven days.

To request elevated permissions from your global administrator:

  1. From the Azure portal, open Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

  2. If the banner "You're seeing limited information." is present, select it.

    Banner informing a user they can request tenant-wide permissions.

  3. In the detailed request form, select the desired role and the justification for why you need these permissions.

    Details page for requesting tenant-wide permissions from your Azure global administrator.

  4. Select Request access.

    An email is sent to the global administrator. The email contains a link to Defender for Cloud where they can approve or reject the request.

    Email to the global administrator for new permissions.

    After the global administrator selects Review the request and completes the process, the decision is emailed to the requesting user.

Next steps

Learn more about Defender for Cloud permissions in the following related page: