CISA.MS.AAD.7.2: Privileged users SHALL be provisioned with finer-grained roles instead of Global Administrator.

ID	CISA.MS.AAD.7.2
Severity	High
Suite	CISA SCuBA baselines
Product	Entra ID
Feature	Roles and administrators
Security area	Privileged access
Resource type	User
User impact of fixing	Low
Effort to fix	Medium
Benchmark	CISA SCuBA Secure Configuration Baselines for Microsoft 365 ScubaGear main, 2026-10-11, MS.AAD.7.2 (SHALL)
Framework controls	cisa-scuba:MS.AAD.7.2 nist-800-53-r5:AC-5 Separation of Duties
MITRE ATT&CK	T1098.003, T1136.003, T1651
Reads from	Microsoft Graph

What this checks and how to fix it

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

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Mito check, based on CISA ScubaGear. Author: soulemike; contributors: thomas-s-schmidt, mrdos010. Open-source licences.