PlannedEmail & identity

Identity and access: MFA, conditional access and privileged accounts

Identity is the perimeter now. This is how to configure it without locking everyone out.

LevelPractitioner
Material3 modules, 9 lessons
Reading time1 h 31 m
StatusPlanned — not open

This course is not available yet

It is planned and the outline below is a first draft, so it may yet change. There is no enrolment and no date — when it is ready it will be on this page.

If you need this capability now rather than later, Identity & access management is the service that covers it, or talk to us.

Who it is for

IT administrators running Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace for an organisation of any size.

Practitioner. For people who administer these systems day to day.

Assumed beforehand:

  • Administrative access to your identity provider

What you will be able to do

  • Explain why SMS and app-notification MFA are not equivalent, and which attacks defeat each
  • Write conditional access policies that fail safe rather than fail open
  • Separate privileged accounts from daily-use accounts, and justify the inconvenience
  • Plan a break-glass account that works when the identity provider does not

Outline

3 modules, 9 lessons, 1 h 31 m of material. The times are the sum of the lessons rather than a round figure.

01MFA is not one thing

The factors differ by orders of magnitude in what they resist.

What each factor actually stops12 m

SMS, TOTP, push, and phishing-resistant keys, against the attacks that exist.

Push fatigue and prompt bombing8 m

Why approval prompts get approved, and number matching.

The adversary-in-the-middle proxy10 m

Session-token theft, which defeats every factor except the bound ones.

02Conditional access without an outage

A policy that locks out the administrator who wrote it is the standard first attempt.

Report-only mode first9 m

Measuring who a policy would have blocked before it blocks them.

Device, location and risk conditions12 m

What each signal is worth, and which ones are trivially faked.

Break-glass accounts10 m

Excluded from everything, monitored for use, and tested on a schedule.

03Privilege

The account that reads email should not be the account that can delete the tenant.

Separating daily and privileged accounts10 m

The arrangement, and the objections to expect.

Just-in-time elevation10 m

Standing access against requested access, and what each costs.

Reviewing who has what10 m

Access reviews that are not a rubber stamp.

Format. Written lessons with configuration walkthroughs. Delivery mechanism is not built yet.

Would you rather we just did it?

This course exists because the work behind it is work we do. If you need the result rather than the skill, identity & access management is the service that covers it.