Microsoft switches all Azure accounts to multi-factor authentication
Azure customers will be switched to multi-factor authentication from July, Microsoft has announced somewhat covertly.
(Image: Bild erstellt mit KI in Bing Designer durch heise online / dmk)
An announcement from Microsoft almost went unnoticed: All Azure users are to be switched to multifactor authentication (MFA). And this will happen as early as July this year.
Our author Günter Born noticed this. In the Microsoft tech community, company vice president Erin Chapple, who is responsible for the Azure core infrastructure, wrote back in mid-May that Microsoft will require MFA for all Azure users.
MFA changeover begins in July
The Azure teams are to start deploying additional tenant-level security measures requiring multifactor authentication in July. This basic security requirement is intended in particular to protect cloud investments and the companies themselves.
Multifactor authentication is a common requirement of cloud service providers. Users must provide two or more pieces of evidence to confirm their identity before a service or resource is approved for access, explains Chapple. This adds an extra layer of protection to standard username and password authentication.
The distribution should take place gradually to generate as few side effects as possible. Microsoft intends to communicate the specific dates of the changeover directly to the affected customers via email and notification in the portal.
Customers with Azure tenants can also switch to MFA earlier, using an MFA wizard for Microsoft's Entra. Back in November last year, Microsoft introduced automatically set up conditional access policies for Entra enterprise customers to enforce MFA protection for customers. The MFA protection helps in particular to prevent access to accounts with access data from phishing attacks or previous data leaks, as the username and password alone no longer allow access.
(dmk)