Microsoft Azure’s Conditional Access is a really great way to get a company using Multi-Factor Authentication. The old argument of not wanting MFA to get in the way of logins constantly goes away with this solution, because it lets you set the rules and scenarios where MFA will and won’t trigger.

To be more accurate, the access controls that Conditional Access can use lets you use more than just MFA to log in (username/password/token style). You can set the rules so a trusted device negates the need for MFA.

This isn’t new anymore either. Here’s a video from Microsoft back in March 2017 talking about how all this works:

What this means is that someone with a username and password on a device that is either InTune enrolled, or set up for Azure AD Hybrid is trustworthy enough. Of course this is less secure than asking for MFA every time, but do you really need to do that when someone is using their work laptop?

Another condition to choose from is ‘Locations’. You can decide that MFA won’t kick in if the login is coming from inside your corporate network. You can also target different applications with different rules that stack – so maybe the payroll system will always ask for MFA, but a less sensitive one will only ask when not on a managed device.

Security wise, there’s also a ‘Sign-in Risk‘ option where each authentication attempt is evaluated and given a risk ranking, and access can be granted or blocked based on the results. Note that this one needs Azure AD Premium P2 which isn’t part of the Microsoft 365 E3 subscription – E5 or separate licensing is required.

Because Conditional Access works like a bunch of Outlook rules, you can slowly build up and adjust what kicks in when. It’s really easy to do, and there’s really no excuse (once you have licensing!) to stop you setting it up ready to demo to staff. 

Combine Conditional Access with Azure AD App Proxy where you can externalise any internal web based app, while forcing auth on it and you’ve got an easy way of enabling workers to do their jobs remotely, while being happy about the security around it – and NOT just poking a hole in a firewall, exposing your IIS box to the world.