Network traffic is routed through Global Secure Access for security policy enforcement

Overview

Traffic forwarding profiles are the foundational mechanism through which Global Secure Access captures and routes network traffic to Microsoft’s Security Service Edge infrastructure. If you don’t enable the appropriate traffic forwarding profiles, network traffic bypasses the Global Secure Access service entirely, and users don’t get these network access protections.

There are three distinct profiles:

• Microsoft traffic profile: Captures Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Graph, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and other Microsoft 365 workloads.
• Private access profile: Captures traffic destined for internal corporate resources.
• Internet access profile: Captures traffic to the public internet including non-Microsoft SaaS applications.

If you don’t enable these profiles:

• You can’t enforce security policies, web content filtering, threat protection, or Universal Continuous Access Evaluation.
• Threat actors who compromise user credentials can access corporate resources without the security controls that Global Secure Access would otherwise apply.

Remediation

• Enable the Microsoft traffic forwarding profile. For more information, see Manage the Microsoft traffic profile.
• Enable the Private Access traffic forwarding profile. For more information, see Manage the Private Access traffic forwarding profile.
• Enable the Internet Access traffic forwarding profile. For more information, see Manage the Internet Access traffic forwarding profile.

Run it

The check runs as part of the whole assessment, with the ZeroTrustAssessment module installed:

Install-Module ZeroTrustAssessment -Scope CurrentUser
Connect-Maester
Invoke-Maester -Pack ZTA -SkipBuiltIn

Leave out -SkipBuiltIn to run Maester’s own checks in the same run.

About this check

Severity	High
Effort to fix	Medium
Impact on users	Low
Pillar	Network
Category	Global Secure Access
Product	Entra ID
Feature	Global Secure Access
Area	Access control
Licence	Entra_Premium_Private_Access, Entra_Premium_Internet_Access, Entra_Suite, P2
Tenant	Workforce

Product, feature, area and ATT&CK are Maester’s: the assessment does not record them, so Maester keeps them in the pack’s taxonomy.json.

A Microsoft check, part of the Zero Trust Assessment pack. Text from ZeroTrustAssessment 3.1.0, © Microsoft, MIT licence.