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Multifactor Authentication MFA and Virtual Machines VM
We are a small development company using Office365. For a new project we now want to use some Windows VMs in the cloud. Because Azure integrates nicely with Office365 it seems to make sense to create...
- Ok, so I think I found the problem.
As described above I have disabled MFA for my account in order to be able to login to the VMs using the AzureAD credentials. I was then able to login as desired but got redirected to the MFA setup wizard every time I logged in to some MS website. I then skipped the setup as I expected this would deny login to the VMs again.
I now realized that this MFA setup was for another organization where I was added as an external user. This organization still has company-wide MFA required and therefore I was bothered with the setup at every login. I now completed the MFA setup process and it really only requires it for that company and not for my own company so login to the VMs is still possible. I have to admit that I find this behavior quite confusing as it is nowhere shown for what organization you are setting up MFA.
Therefore my main problem is solved now. I would prefer to enable MFA and disable it only for RDP or even better enable it everywhere but unfortunately this seems to be too complicated. If a simple solution pops up please let me know.
I'm confused about whether you have or don't have conditional access. But there are a few things to look at:
- You can use: Azure Windows VM Sign-in service principal in your Conditional Access policies to control access: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/devices/howto-vm-sign-in-azure-ad-windows?WT.mc_id=AZ-MVP-5004796#using-conditional-access
- You can deploy a NAT Gateway on your virtual network and force traffic through specific IP addresses, that you can then whitelist in your MFA policy. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/nat-gateway/nat-gateway-resource?WT.mc_id=AZ-MVP-5004796
lukemurraynz As I said: "Azure AD conditional access is only available when using Azure AD Premium which increases costs by about 5-10$ per user per month. That's inacceptable only to turn off functionality!" So: No.
From what I understand both your suggestions involve the use of conditional access policies and are therefore not what I'm looking for.
- You can use Network Gateway with per user MFA, by adding the private IP your traffic will be coming from (from the NAT gateway) into the per user MFA.
Conditional Access is part of Business Premium now, so depending on your Office licenses, you may already have it.- We are having Office 365 "Business Basic" licenses. If I go to https://portal.azure.com/#blade/Microsoft_AAD_IAM/ConditionalAccessBlade/Policies the "New policy" button is deactivated and a link to purchase Premium (P2) is shown.
Looking at the documentation I see that VPN Gateways require Conditional Access Policies as well so not what I'm looking for I think. I may be wrong though so if someone could post a link to a step by step setup guide that gives me what we need without CAP I would appreciate it.
Again the requirements:
- We want a simple Windows VM where we can configure login by assigning IAM roles (login as user/admin) and don't need additional local credentials.
- We don't care if we have to enable or disable MFA but we don't want to get bothered upon every Azure login with a redirect to the setup MFA wizard (which can be cancelled).
- The solution must not significantly increase the costs and it must not require a huge setup.
As of now I feel Azure cannot provide this. Very disappointing (but thanks for the responses).