security group role assignment

This browser is no longer supported.

Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.

Control user access to environments: security groups and licenses

• 15 contributors

If your company has multiple environments, you can use security groups to control which licensed users can be members of a particular environment.

For information on how user access works for Microsoft Dataverse for Teams, see User access to Dataverse for Teams environments .

Consider the following example scenario:

In this example, four security groups provide controlled access to a specific environment.

Note the following information about security groups:

About nested security groups

Members of a nested security group in an environment security group are not pre-provisioned or automatically added to the environment . However, they can be added into the environment when you create a Dataverse group team for the nested security group.

An example of this scenario: you assigned a security group for the environment when the environment was created. During the lifecycle of the environment, you want to add members to the environment that are managed by security groups. You create a security group in Microsoft Entra ID—managers, for example—and assign all your managers to the group. You then add this security group as a child of the environment security group, create a Dataverse group team , and assign a security role to the group team. Your managers can now access Dataverse immediately.

A member of a nested security group is also added into the environment at run time when the member accesses the environment the first time. But the member won't be able to run any application and access any data until a security role is assigned.

When users are added to the security group, they are added to the environment.

When users are removed from the group, they are disabled in the environment.

When a security group is associated with an existing environment with users, all users in the environment that are not members of the group will be disabled.

If an environment doesn't have an associated security group, all users with a Dataverse license (customer engagement apps—Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation—Power Automate, Power Apps, and others) will be created as users and enabled in the environment.

If a security group is associated with an environment, only users with Dataverse licenses or per app plan that are members of the environment security group will be created as users in the environment.

If you don't specify a security group, all users who have a Dataverse license (customer engagement apps such as Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service) or per app plan will be added to the new environment.

New : Security groups can't be assigned to default and developer environment types. If you've already assigned a security group to your default or developer environment, we recommend removing it since the default environment is intended to be shared with all users in the tenant and the developer environment is intended for use by only the owner of the environment.

Environments support associating the following group types: Security and Microsoft 365. Associating other group types is not supported.

When you select a security group, be sure to select a Microsoft Entra security group and not one created in on-premises Windows Active Directory. On-premises Windows AD security groups aren't supported.

If a user isn't part of the assigned security group to the environment but has the Power Platform Administrator role, the user will still show as an active user and will be able to sign in.

If a user is assigned the Dynamics 365 Service Admin role, then the user must be part of the security group before they are enabled in the environment. They can't access the environment until they are added to the security group and enabled.

If the security group associated to the environment changes (that is, the old security group is removed and a new one is associated to the environment), a clean-up of existing users in the environment is initiated, and then adding of new users to the environment happens. In most cases, this process is done in minutes, but depending on the number of users in the old and new security groups, this may take several hours.

All licensed users, whether or not they are members of the security groups, must be assigned security roles to access data in the environments. You assign security roles in the web application. If users don’t have a security role, they'll get a data access denied error when trying to run an app. Users can't access environments until they are assigned at least one security role for that environment. For more information, see Configure environment security . Automatic user assignment to an environment is not supported for trial environments. For trial environments, users must be assigned manually.

Create a security group and add members to the security group

Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center .

Select Teams & groups > Active teams & groups .

Select + Add a group .

Change the type to Security group , add the group Name and Description , and then select Add > Close .

Select the group you created, and then next to Members , select Edit .

Select + Add members . Select the users to add to the security group, and then select Save > Close several times to return to the Groups list.

To remove a user from the security group, select the security group and then, next to Members , select Edit . Select - Remove members , and then select X for each member you want to remove.

If the users you want to add to the security group are not created, create the users and assign the Dataverse licenses to them.

To add multiple users, see: bulk add users to Office365 groups .

Create a user and assign license

In the Microsoft 365 admin center, select Users > Active users > + Add a user .

Enter the user information, select licenses, and then select Add .

More information: Add users and assign licenses at the same time

Or, purchase and assign per-app passes: About Power Apps per app plans

If an environment has a Power Apps per-app plan allocated, all users will be considered licensed when they attempt to access the environment, including users that don't have individual licenses assigned. Per-app plan allocation on an environment satisfies the requirement for users to be licensed in order to access the environment.

Associate a security group with an environment

Sign in to the Power Platform admin center as an admin (Dynamics 365 admin or Microsoft Power Platform admin).

In the navigation pane, select Environments .

Select the name of the environment.

Select Edit .

In the Edit details pane, select the Edit icon in the Security group area.

Only the first 200 security groups will be returned. Use Search to look for a specific security group.

Select a security group, select Done , and then select Save .

The security group is associated with the environment.

Users running canvas apps when a security group is associated with the environment of the app must be members of the security group to be able to run the canvas app, regardless of whether the app has been shared with them. Otherwise, users will see this error message: "You can't open apps in this environment. You are not a member of the environment's security group." If your Power Platform admin has set governance details for your organization, you will see a governance contact that you may reach out to for security group membership.

Create users

Was this page helpful?

Additional resources

Our thoughts on the future of digital innovation and the cloud.

Using azure ad groups to manage ad role assignments.

• #Governance and Security
• #The Best of Microsoft Azure

Azure Active Directory (AD) Groups have proven to be a silver bullet to control Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) access. It is true whether we talk about controlled access to resources or other Microsoft services using Office 365 groups and Security Groups. The   Azure AD Group’s idea is to minimize the manual permission assignment for any particular benefit or use case and rather have AD Groups as members and manage the permission at the group level.

Suppose you have a dozen employees requesting access to any particular Azure service ( Analytics Resource Group) . In that case, you’d want to create a Security Group ( Analytics_Administrator)  with Azure service permission. Then, add all the employees to that  Analytics_Administrator  Group for permissions. This moves the permissions management to the group level, and anybody who’s part of  Analytics_Administrator  will have the necessary permission automatically.

What’s New?

Microsoft has taken the Azure AD Groups to the next level and introduced the RBAC control capability for  Azure AD Roles.  With this feature, you can use AD groups to manage Azure AD Roles’ permissions with minimum effort. You no longer need to assign explicit AD Roles to any employee anymore and then keep a tab on ongoing changes.

Feature In-Depth

Create group using azure portal.

As you create a new security group in Azure, you’ll see an option ‘ Azure AD roles can be assigned to the group ‘ in GUI interface. As you turn this feature to ‘ Yes ‘, the created group can be used to control Role assignment to group level.

Create Group using Azure PowerShell

This feature can also be enabled using PowerShell or CLI deployment by setting isAssignableToRole to true , if doing programmatic deployments. You however can’t set this property on existing groups.

Install the Azure AD Preview module to get the up to date modules with new feature using the following command:

As you install the preview module, use the following command to create a new group with role-assignable feature.

While assigning the role permission to this newly created group, use the command New-AzureADMSRoleAssignment along with role definition and group ID.

Use the following command to get the desired role that you’d like to manage with this newly created group followed by another command to assign the role permission.

There’s limit of 200 role-assignable groups per tenant as of now.

Limitations

With any new feature comes it’s own limitations. Since the feature is still in preview, there are some things to consider before you plan on adaptation.

• You cannot use the role-assignable groups with your custom AD roles .
• You cannot use on-premises groups to assign AD role permissions in Hybrid-AD scenario.

There are some ongoing known issue and changes being rolled out as the feature gets adopted more extensively. You can check the known issues at this link .

There’s a minimum requirement of Azure AD P1 license to leverage this feature. If you are using Azure PIM, you must have Azure AD P2 to fulfill the license requirements.

• Use Cloud Groups to Manage Role Assignment
• Create group for assigning role

More Insights

Digital transformation firm invero named runner-up in microsoft impact awards, azure carlsberg: modernize a centuries old country, let's talk about powering your digital growth, head office, invero headquarters.

Regional Offices

Using Azure AD Groups to manage AD Role Assignments

3 minutes read

August 20, 2020.

Table of Content

Azure Active Directory (AD) Groups have proven to be a silver bullet to control RBAC access, whether we talk about controlled access to resources or other Microsoft services using Office 365 groups and Security Groups. The idea of Azure AD Group is to minimize the manual permission assignment for any particular service or use case and rather have AD Groups as a member and manage the permission at the group level.

Let’s say if you have a dozen employees requesting access to any particular Azure service, say Analytics Resource Group, you’d want to create a Security Group, Analytics_Administrator with permission to Azure service, and then add all the employees to that Analytics_Administrator Group for permissions. This moves the permissions management to the group level and anybody who’s part of Analytics_Administrator will have the necessary permission automatically.

What’s New?

Microsoft has taken the Azure AD Groups to a next level and introduced the capability of doing the RBAC control for Azure AD Roles as you would do for any other resource access controls. With this feature, you can use AD groups to manage permissions for Azure AD Roles with minimum efforts. You no longer need to assign explicit AD Roles to any employee anymore and then keep a tab on ongoing changes.

Feature In-Depth

Create group using azure portal.

As you create a new security group in Azure, you’ll see an option ‘ Azure AD roles can be assigned to the group ‘ in GUI interface. As you turn this feature to ‘ Yes ‘, the created group can be used to control Role assignment to group level.

Create Group using Azure PowerShell

This feature can also be enabled using PowerShell or CLI deployment by setting isAssignableToRole to true , if doing programmatic deployments. You however can’t set this property on existing groups.

Install the Azure AD Preview module to get the up to date modules with new feature using the following command:

As you install the preview module, use the following command to create a new group with role-assignable feature.

While assigning the role permission to this newly created group, use the command New-AzureADMSRoleAssignment along with role definition and group ID.

Use the following command to get the desired role that you’d like to manage with this newly created group followed by another command to assign the role permission.

#Get Role Definition $roleDefinition = Get-AzureADMSRoleDefinition -Filter "displayName eq 'Security Administrator'" #Create a role assignment $roleAssignment = New-AzureADMSRoleAssignment -ResourceScope '/' -RoleDefinitionId $roleDefinition.Id -PrincipalId $group.Id

Limitations

With any new feature comes it’s own limitations. Since the feature is still in preview, there are some things to consider before you plan on adaptation.

• You cannot use the role-assignable groups with your custom AD roles .
• You cannot use on-premises groups to assign AD role permissions in Hybrid-AD scenario.

There are some ongoing known issue and changes being rolled out as the feature gets adopted more extensively. You can check the known issues at the link below:

There’s a minimum requirement of Azure AD P1 license to leverage this feature. If you are using Azure PIM, you must have Azure AD P2 to fulfill the license requirements.

• Use Cloud Groups to Manage Role Assignment
• Create group for assigning role

Recommended Articles

Identity and Access Management (IAM) – Everything You Need To Know

Azure Policy – High-Level Overview

6 minutes read, august 12, 2020, stay updated with new releases..

Helping Companies Secure and Automate their Cloud Environment

Parveen Singh © 2024

Quick Links

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter!

By entering your email address, you agree to our privacy policy .

RBAC in Azure: A Practical Guide

What is azure rbac.

Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) enables access management for Azure resources. It’s an authorization system built into the Azure Resource Manager. You can use Azure RBAC to define which specific users should be allowed access to Azure cloud resources and assign a set of privileges for each user group. Let’s learn more about the specifics.

Azure RBAC vs Azure ABAC

As mentioned earlier, Azure RBAC allows you to manage access to Azure resources, defining what users can do with resources and their access areas. It lets you use role definitions and role assignments to control access. However, it does not offer fine-grained access management and can be difficult when managing hundreds of role assignments.

Azure attribute-based access control (ABAC) works differently.

Azure ABAC allows you to add role assignment conditions to achieve fine-grained access control. It builds on Azure RBAC, letting you add attributes for specific actions. Each role assignment condition provides an additional, optional check to a role assignment. Once you set it up, the condition can filter down permissions provisioned as a part of the role definition and assignment. 

Azure RBAC Concepts

Azure rbac roles.

In Azure RBAC, a role definition is a set of permissions (role). It defines users’ actions, such as write, delete, and read. You can define high-level roles, such as an owner, or specific roles, such as a virtual machine (VM) reader.

Azure provides various built-in roles, including a virtual machine contributor role that allows users to create and manage VMs. If the built-in roles do not satisfy your requirements, you can also define Azure custom roles. You can use data actions to grant access to data stored in a specific object. 

The term scope refers to a set of resources with specific access. It enables you to grant the relevant security principal to a certain role. Limiting the scope means limiting the scope of resources at risk if the security principal is compromised.

Azure RBAC lets you specify a scope at four levels, including a management group level, a subscription level, a resource group level, and a resource level. Azure structures scopes in a parent-child relationship, with each hierarchy level making the scope more specific. It lets you assign roles at any of the four levels. However, note that the level you choose determines how the role is applied. 

Azure also lets you use management groups, a level of scope above subscriptions. However, management groups support complex hierarchies. The diagram below illustrates an example of a hierarchy of management groups and subscriptions.

Role Assignments

Role assignments enable you to attach role definitions to specific users, groups, service principals, or managed identities at a certain scope. When creating a role assignment, you grant specific access, and removing the assignment revokes this access.

Here is a diagram that illustrates an example of a role assignment: 

This example assigns a contributor role to the marketing group—only for the pharma-sales resource group. It enables all users in the marketing group to create or manage Azure resources in the pharma-sales resource group. However, it does not provide marketing users with access to resources external to the pharma-sales resource group.

Azure Groups

Role assignments are transitive for groups, allowing users to gain permissions assigned to groups. If user A is a member of group B and group B is a member of group C with its own role assignment, user A gets the permissions in group C’s role assignment.

Azure RBAC uses an additive model to prevent issues when users get several overlapping role assignments. You can see an example of this principle in the image below. A certain user is granted a reader role by a resource group and a contributor role at the subscription level. The sum of the reader and contributor permissions is the contributor role. The reader role assignment has no impact.

Best Practices for Azure RBAC

Only grant the access users need.

With Azure RBAC, you can create isolation between different teams, granting each team only the access they need to get the job done. 

Instead of granting unlimited permissions to everyone with an Azure subscription or resource, you can only allow specific actions within specific scopes. Avoid assigning broad roles, even if they seem more convenient at first. When you create a custom role, include only the permissions your users need. This ensures that there’s less risk if a principal account is compromised.

The following diagram shows the recommended pattern for granting permissions in Azure RBAC.

Use Azure AD Privileged Identity Management

To protect privileged accounts from malicious cyberattacks, Azure Active Directory Privileged Identity Management (PIM) can be used to reduce privilege issuance time and improve visibility through reports and alerts. PIM helps protect privileged accounts by providing temporary privileged access to Azure AD and Azure resources. Access is time-limited, after which privileges are automatically revoked.

Assign Roles Using Unique Role ID Instead of the Role Name

Role names may change over time, but the role ID always stays the same. Some common examples of changes to role names is when you are using your own custom role and decide to change the name, or when you are using a preview role that has (Preview) in the name. When the role is released from preview, it is automatically renamed.

To ensure consistency over time, it is a good idea to always assign users to a role ID when assigning roles using scripting or automation. This way, scripts won’t break if the name changes in the future. 

Assign Roles to Groups and Limit Subscription Owners

To make it easier to manage role assignments, do not assign roles directly to users. Instead, assign roles to groups. Assigning roles to groups instead of users minimizes the number of role assignments. Note that Azure imposes restrictions on the total role assignments allowed per subscription.

Microsoft recommends having a maximum of 3 owners for each Azure subscription, to reduce the likelihood of a breach by a compromised or malicious insider.

Cloud RBAC with Frontegg

Frontegg provides out of the box RBAC model implementation. Customers can now create their own roles and permissions which represent their product models and use cases. Additionally, Frontegg empowers the end users to create custom roles to represent their permissions model, without having to change a single line of code in the product. Sounds too good to be true? Try it out now.  

Looking to take your User Management to the next level?

Rate this post

4.8 / 5. 1355

No reviews yet

Full Solution, Easy Migration

Privacy overview.