Unit 1: Introduction

Modern cloud environments rely heavily on administrative roles to manage identity, infrastructure, applications, and data. These roles are powerful by design, but unrestricted or permanent administrative access significantly increases security risk. A compromised admin account can lead to widespread damage across Microsoft Entra ID, Azure resources, Microsoft 365, and SaaS applications.

To address this risk, Microsoft provides Privileged Identity Management (PIM). PIM allows organizations to control, monitor, and limit privileged access by ensuring that administrative permissions are granted only when needed, for a limited time, and with proper oversight.

In this module, you learn how to design and implement a privileged access strategy. You explore how to configure PIM, assign and activate roles, review and audit privileged activity, and manage emergency access (break-glass) accounts. The goal is to balance security with operational efficiency by minimizing standing privileges while still enabling administrators to perform required tasks.

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• Define a privileged access strategy for administrative users, including resources, roles, approvals, and thresholds.
• Configure Privileged Identity Management for Microsoft Entra roles.
• Configure Privileged Identity Management for Azure roles and resources.
• Assign eligible and active roles.
• Manage and approve PIM activation requests.
• Analyze PIM audit history and reports.
• Create and manage emergency access (break-glass) accounts.
• Configure and manage privileged access groups.

Why privileged access must be controlled

Organizations aim to minimize the number of users who have access to sensitive resources. Reducing privileged access:

• Lowers the chance of a malicious actor gaining control.
• Reduces the impact of compromised credentials.
• Prevents accidental changes to critical resources.

At the same time, administrators still need to perform privileged operations. PIM enables just-in-time (JIT) access, ensuring users receive elevated permissions only when required, and that their activity is tracked and auditable.