Privileged users SHALL be provisioned with finer-grained roles instead of Global Administrator

Contributed by Michael Soule with 2 co-contributorsAll contributors →

Part of CISA · Entra ID · Roles and administrators · All checks

Run this check

Invoke-Maester -TestId CISA.MS.AAD.7.2

Overview

Privileged users SHALL be provisioned with finer-grained roles instead of Global Administrator.

Rationale: Many privileged administrative users do not need unfettered access to the tenant to perform their duties. By assigning them to roles based on least privilege, the risks associated with having their accounts compromised are reduced.

Remediation action:

This policy is based on the ratio below:

X = (Number of users assigned to the Global Administrator role) / (Number of users assigned to other highly privileged roles)

1. Follow the instructions for policy MS.AAD.7.1v1 above to get a count of users assigned to the Global Administrator role.
2. Follow the instructions for policy MS.AAD.7.1v1 above but get a count of users assigned to the other highly privileged roles (not Global Administrator). If a user is assigned to both Global Administrator and other roles, only count that user for the Global Administrator assignment.
3. Divide the value from step 2 from the value from step 1 to calculate X. If X is less than or equal to 1 then the tenant is compliant with the policy.

Related links

• CISA 7.2 Highly Privileged User Access - MS.AAD.7.2v1
• CISA ScubaGear Rego Reference

Details

Every attribute of this check

Field	Value
Test ID	CISA.MS.AAD.7.2
Severity	High
Suite	CISA
Product	Entra ID
Feature	Roles and administrators
Area	Privileged access
Resource type	User
User impact	Low
Implementation cost	Medium
MITRE ATT&CK	T1098.003 Additional Cloud Roles, T1136.003 Cloud Account, T1651 Cloud Administration Command
Supports benchmark	CISA SCuBA Secure Configuration Baselines for Microsoft 365 (version ScubaGear main, 2026-10-11), requirement MS.AAD.7.2
Criticality	SHALL
Upstream requirement	MS.AAD.7.2v1
Supports controls	cisa-scuba:MS.AAD.7.2, nist-800-53-r5:AC-5
PowerShell test	Test-MtCisaGlobalAdminRatio
Services	Graph

Source

• Test: tests/cisa/entra/Test.CISA.MS.AAD.7.2.ps1
• Documentation: tests/cisa/entra/Test.CISA.MS.AAD.7.2.md