How to support CSP customers while protecting the security of their tenant? Critical for security-conscious customers, and/or those with high-security requirements. Permissions granted by delegated admin are too far-reaching, do not allow for fine-grained access, and even the ability to audit use is unclear or non-existent.
This is something I had first started looking at just over a year ago. It doesn't look like anything has improved since, but customers are understandably only becoming increasingly concerned with this.
Here is some feedback we just received earlier today from a current customer looking to move to CSP licensing:
> Even with a NDA with <direct CSP provider> I am not at all comfortable making a third party of a third party delegated admins for our environment and granting them the ability to access all our cloud data which is what the terms state we’d be agreeing to. ... I really like the benefits of CSP otherwise so if there’s some other way to make this work we’d probably still do it. I also have reservations about a vendor having these all-encompassing permissions. I understand it can be needed for some admin tasks and troubleshooting but I don’t like how much of a free for all Microsoft makes it.
(I do believe there is some confusion in the above, in that our direct CSP provider / reseller would not have delegated admin - but only access to contact, subscription, and billing details. However, even this would be good to have further detailed in a format that we can share with concerned customers.)
If I were in the customer's place, I would absolutely be asking the exact same questions, and imposing the same requirements - and have so in prior organizations.
I have several other customers I've been working with, who I have not, in good faith, been able to recommend putting into CSP and the required delegated admin for - given the concerns outlined here.
We currently have a few hundred customers enrolled in CSP - and have an opportunity to bring even more into the CSP program, but the concerns outlined here do not help with the effort.
See also: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-solution-provider/customer-management/administration-delegation
A number of specific points and concerns:
1) The list of roles and permissions that can be applied through Partner Center are available at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/permissions-overview . Of these, only "Admin agent", "Helpdesk Agent", and maybe "Sales agent" apply to the customer tenants. "Admin agent" is basically the equivalent of "Global Administrator" within a customer tenant, and "Helpdesk Agent" is effectively a "Helpdesk Administrator" (Password Administrator). The admin roles from a tenant perspective are documented at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/admin/add-users/about-admin-roles . As an O365 admin in my own organization, I can delegate permissions to others through at least 262,144 different combinations of the 18 customized administrator roles currently available in my tenant. (This increases to 38 roles available and nearly 275 billion combinations when using the roles available in Azure AD.) As a partner with delegated admin to a customer, there are only 2: "Everything", or "Helpdesk Agent" (or none). See also: https://www.yammer.com/office365partners/#/Threads/show?threadId=119473804279808 and https://www.yammer.com/office365partners/#/Threads/show?threadId=804328021 .
2) Everything is "all or nothing". We also have well over 100 engineers in our organization (not counting back office staff, etc.). To assign either "Admin agent" or "Helpdesk Agent" to one of our staff, means that they have that same permission across a few hundred customers. There is no way to filter a staff member's access to only one customer, or ideally a group of customers. (While we do have some additional flexibility in granting access through guest accounts in Azure AD, these permissions do not carry over to / are not usable in O365.)
3) We could consider falling-back to the use of extended and manually-reviewed audit logging as a compensating control. However, there are many limitations here - including that all logging appears to be held within each individual customer tenant only - and for us to review delegated admin activity from our partner account as a whole, it appears that we'd need to query each and every one of our customer tenants. Further concerns are raised here at https://www.yammer.com/office365partners/#/Threads/show?threadId=62199238885376 (unanswered).
While I'm on the topic, the "pretty wicked security hole" documented at https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/264636-general/suggestions/33233917-powershell-mfa-for-csp-delegated-admin-privileges also still needs to be addressed, well over a year later now. Can someone from Microsoft please review and respond to this UserVoice entry? Everyone else - please vote...
What are other CSP partners doing in terms of security controls to meet customer needs and expectations as it relates to CSP licensing? (We do have our own internal security program that I am a part of - which includes even stronger MFA controls across our entire organization than we'd otherwise been able to have approved, partially because of the customer security concerns here.)
As per https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/uspartner_ts2team/2016/04/30/removing-the-csp-as-delegated-admin-in-office-365-customer-tenants/ , it looks like the simplest answer may to just be to have needing customers remove the delegated admin permissions. However: 1) Is this still accurate and working, 3 years later? And 2) we'll need to determine what limitations, if any, may then exist that would prohibit us from providing CSP licensing in this model, even if we then are not able to directly assign new licenses to users, or otherwise provide direct support to the customer as per CSP terms (at least not without having other customer-provided access given to us).
Just looking at this again now, it looks like we *might* be able to put the "Admin agent" and "Helpdesk Agent" roles behind the new "Azure AD entitlement management". This is less than 2 months old, still in preview, and what Privileged Identity Management really should have been all along, in my opinion. It does require Azure AD Premium P2 (or its parent EMS E5 offfering).
