Microsoft 365 service principal best practices

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Microsoft 365 service principal best practices

How to design, deploy, and operate service principals safely — credentials, permissions, and lifecycle.

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Should automation use a user account or a service principal?

A service principal — an app registration with a certificate, or a managed identity in Azure. User accounts for automation break MFA policies, expire, and tie a system to a person. Service principals get exactly the per…

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Can Conditional Access apply to service principals?

Yes, with Conditional Access for workload identities (Entra Workload ID Premium licence): policies can block single-tenant service principals from unexpected locations or when Identity Protection flags them as risky.

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What is the least-privilege pattern for a Graph automation?

Application permissions only for what the script does, scoped where possible (Sites.Selected, Exchange application access policies), a certificate rather than a secret, an owner recorded on the registration, and a revie…

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