Describe Zero Trust Principles for Microsoft 365

Data security and compliance with regulatory acts are important for every organization. It is crucial to be mindful of how data is stored and transmitted for every organization, and whether it complies with the following:

• Privacy legislation: The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the United States’ Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
• Financial regulations: The Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act
• Industry compliance: The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)

With the rise of cybersecurity breaches and attacks, there is an urgent need to understand the proper configurations of the available services and features. Cloud services have changed the way organizations deploy technology and secure data.

A clear understanding of Microsoft 365’s out-of-the-box security features and services is the key to successfully deploying cloud services...

Describe the Zero-Trust Model

Traditional Information Technology (IT) security measures have relied primarily on treating the corporate infrastructure as a boundary—everything inside the local network is safe, while anything outside the firewall is a threat.

However, the proliferation of mobile devices, hybrid work, and Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) scenarios has allowed organizational data to be freely transported beyond the corporate network boundary. Firewalls in an office setting are not effective when the data you are trying to protect is on a tablet computer that was left at a restaurant or on the subway.

With that in mind, Microsoft (and the tech industry as a whole) has pivoted from the traditional security perimeter defense perspective to a model called zero trust.

Zero trust is based on the concept of minimizing an organization’s risk footprint by interrogating the security of everything that attempts to access data or services. The zero-trust model...

Describe Microsoft Granular Delegated Admin Privileges (GDAP) Principles

Zero trust principles such as least privilege don’t just apply to your organization. In the context of service providers, it’s important to make sure that they are also following secure administration practices.

This is where Granular Delegated Admin Privileges (GDAP) comes into play.

GDAP’s capabilities empower partners to exercise precise control over access to their clients’ workloads, thereby enhancing security measures and addressing potential concerns. This not only enables partners to offer a broader range of services to clients uncomfortable with granting global administrator access but also helps organizations with regulatory requirements necessitating a least-privileged approach be compliant.

GDAP serves as an integral security feature aligned with the zero-trust cybersecurity framework. It empowers partners to configure highly specific and time-bound access to their...

Summary

Microsoft 365 was built with security features in mind. Administrators should take some time to review the wide range of features and controls that are available to them for delegating and administering the security aspects of tenants.

In this chapter, you learned about the overall principles of zero-trust security and its concepts and controls, including managing identity, endpoints, apps, data, infrastructure, and networking. In addition, you grasped ways to manage access to resources through credentials, network perimeter controls, and Conditional Access, as well as using encryption as a layer to protect against unauthorized access or data modification.

In the next chapter, you will cover identity protection and management.

Exam Readiness Drill - Chapter Review Questions

Benchmark Score: 75%

Apart from a solid understanding of key concepts, being able to think quickly under time pressure is a skill that will help you ace your certification exam. That’s why, working on these skills early on in your learning journey is key.

Chapter review questions are designed to improve your test-taking skills progressively with each chapter you learn and review your understanding of key concepts in the chapter at the same time. You’ll find these at the end of each chapter.

Before You Proceed

You need to unlock these resources before you start using them. Unlocking takes less than 10 minutes, can be done from any device, and needs to be done only once. Head over to the start of Chapter 9, Describe the Threat Protection Solutions of Microsoft 365 in this book for instructions on how to unlock them.

To open the Chapter Review Questions for this chapter, click the following link: https://packt...