Will Conditional Access Policies affect Microsoft 365 Licenses?

What is Conditional Access and will you be affected?

Conditional Access Policies are a feature of Azure Active Directory that allow you to control how and when users can access your Microsoft 365 resources.

Conditional Access Policies can help you enhance your cyber security posture and comply with your organisational policies.

Conditional Access is Microsoft's Zero Trust policy engine taking signals from various sources into account when enforcing policy decisions.

Conditional Access policies at their simplest are if-then statements; if a user wants to access a resource, then they must complete an action.

For example: If a user wants to access an application or service like Microsoft 365, then they must perform multifactor authentication to gain access.

For More information on Conditional Access on the Microsoft website, please click here >

Who will be affected?

Currently, you will only be affected if you or a member of your company has a Microsoft 365 Premium License. However, you will not see any change or need to do anything as this will be happening in the background!

Conditional Access Policies will not affect your Microsoft 365 Premium Licenses in terms of cost or functionality.

What does this mean?

In summary – Microsoft are going to enforce an additional layer to your security for your Premium 365 Licenses. We will ensure all your settings are correct. You don't need to do anything!

Why are Microsoft doing this?

Don’t just take it from us, here’s a snippet from the Microsoft blog detailing their reasons for the change:

“Securing an email or phone number to use as a multifactor authentication factor raised costs for fraudsters enough that synthetic account creation plummeted by 99 percent. Before we enacted this policy, users who forgot their passwords recovered their accounts at a rate of only 16 percent. Under the new policy, unaided password recovery jumped to more than 90 percent. And the policy didn’t drive customers away. In fact, the multifactor authentication policy had such a positive effect on integrity, security, and recoverability that customer retention improved by more than 5 percent. Good security reduces friction.”

“…and in a year when we’ve blocked more than 4,000 password attacks per second—we need to do more to drive multifactor authentication adoption.”

Read the full blog here >

Do you need help with Conditional Access or Microsoft 365?

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