Microsoft SC-900 - Microsoft Security Compliance and Identity Fundamentals

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager organizes improvement actions into control action subcategories that mirror core security control types used throughout Microsoft Learn’s SCI content: preventative, detective, and corrective. In the SC-900 security fundamentals guidance, Microsoft describes these control types as follows: “Preventive controls are intended to deter or stop an attack from occurring (for example, encryption and access controls). Detective controls are used to discover and detect attacks that are in progress or have occurred (for example, logging, auditing, and monitoring). Corrective controls are used to limit the damage caused by an incident and to return systems to normal operations (for example, configuration changes, incident response, and recovery activities).”

Applying those definitions to Compliance Manager actions: Encrypt data at rest is a preventative control because it deters exposure by protecting data before an event. Perform a system access audit is a detective action because auditing and reviewing access logs are used to discover and detect misuse or anomalies. Make configuration changes in response to a security incident is a corrective action because it remediates and restores the environment after detection, aligning with Compliance Manager’s corrective action guidance. These mappings reflect how Compliance Manager measures completion of improvement actions that reduce compliance risk through the right mix of preventative, detective, and corrective controls.

Microsoft’s Conditional Access (part of Microsoft Entra ID) evaluates multiple signals to make access decisions. The official description lists typical signals such as “user or group membership, IP location information, device state, application, and real-time risk.” The device state element explicitly refers to conditions like “compliant or hybrid Azure AD joined devices,” allowing policies that grant or block access—or require extra controls—based on whether a device meets compliance/registration requirements.

Regarding evaluation timing, Microsoft’s guidance states that Conditional Access “policies are enforced after the first-factor authentication is completed.” This means the engine needs the user’s primary sign-in context (who the user is and how they authenticated) to evaluate the conditions and then decide whether to allow, block, or require additional controls. Therefore, the statement that policies apply before first factor is not correct.

Finally, Conditional Access includes grant controls such as “Require multi-factor authentication,” and policies can be scoped to specific cloud apps or actions. As a result, you can target a particular application and require MFA when a user attempts to access it, satisfying application-specific risk mitigation while preserving user productivity.

In Microsoft’s security portfolio, Microsoft Defender for Cloud is the service that provides cloud workload protection for Azure and hybrid cloud resources. Microsoft describes it as a “cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) that helps strengthen the security posture of your cloud resources and protect workloads across multicloud and hybrid environments.” The service delivers Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Cloud Workload Protection (CWP) by continuously assessing configurations and protecting workloads such as virtual machines, containers, databases, and storage. Documentation further states that Defender for Cloud “provides threat protection for workloads running in Azure, on-premises, and in other clouds,” giving a single pane to harden resources, detect active threats, and remediate.

By contrast, Azure Monitor focuses on telemetry and observability; the Microsoft cloud security benchmark is a set of prescriptive best practices; and Microsoft Secure Score is an aggregate metric reflecting security posture. None of those deliver the workload protection and active defense capabilities (e.g., recommendations, hardening, and threat detection for servers, containers, and PaaS services) that Defender for Cloud offers. Therefore, the sentence correctly completes as: Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides cloud workload protection for Azure and hybrid cloud resources.

In Microsoft’s cloud responsibility model, Software as a Service (SaaS) is the offering where the cloud provider operates the full application stack and the customer’s responsibility is limited to data and access. Microsoft’s guidance explains that with SaaS, the provider manages the application, runtime, middleware, operating system, virtualization, servers, storage, and networking, while customers focus on “information and identities” and how users access the app. This aligns with your requirement to “manage only the data, user accounts, and user devices” for a cloud-based app. In contrast, PaaS still leaves you responsible for the application and data, and IaaS shifts even more components (OS, middleware, and apps) to you. Microsoft’s shared responsibility descriptions consistently note that SaaS is chosen when organizations want to reduce operational overhead and concentrate on securing and governing their data and identities, leveraging provider controls for platform and infrastructure. Therefore, to meet the scenario of managing only data, user accounts, and devices while the provider runs the rest, SaaS is the correct cloud model.

In Microsoft Purview Information Protection, pre-trained (Microsoft-provided) trainable classifiers are designed to automatically recognize specific categories of content by learning from examples rather than relying only on patterns or keywords. Microsoft’s guidance explains that trainable classifiers “look for data by learning from examples,” and that Microsoft supplies a catalog of “pre-trained classifiers that you can use immediately in your tenant.” The documentation explicitly lists content types these classifiers can recognize, including “Resumes,” along with other categories such as Source code, Threat and harassment, and more. Because they’re already trained by Microsoft, you can use them “to identify and classify items across SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange,” and then take actions such as auto-labeling or enforcing DLP policies based on the classifier match.

By contrast, Content explorer is a reporting tool that lets you view where sensitive info types/labels were found; it doesn’t identify resumes on its own. Activity explorer shows events like DLP policy matches over time. eDiscovery is used for legal hold, search, and review, not for semantic content identification. Therefore, to identify documents that are employee resumes, the correct Microsoft compliance feature is the pre-trained (Microsoft-provided) trainable classifier for Resumes.

ï‚· Security defaults require an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Premium license. No

ï‚· Security defaults can be enabled for a single Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) user. No

ï‚· When Security defaults are enabled, all administrators must use multi-factor authentication (MFA). Yes

Microsoft explains that Security defaults are baseline identity protections that are “available to all tenants at no additional cost” and are intended to “help protect your organization from common identity-related attacks.” They are a tenant-wide setting: Microsoft states that security defaults are “either on or off for the entire tenant” and “can’t be customized or targeted to specific users or groups.” If you require per-user or granular targeting, Microsoft directs customers to use Conditional Access policies instead.

A core behavior of security defaults is enforcing MFA: “All users are required to register for Azure AD Multi-Factor Authentication,” and “administrators are required to perform MFA.” In addition, security defaults “block legacy authentication” and apply other baseline requirements, but they do not enable premium features such as Azure AD Identity Protection or PIM. Summarizing the implications for the statements: no premium license is required; you cannot enable security defaults for just one user because the control is global; and when enabled, administrators must use MFA, with Microsoft recommending exclusion only for a break-glass account if necessary.

Microsoft Entra Permissions Management is Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) solution delivered in the Microsoft Entra admin center, not in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal. Microsoft guidance describes it as a CIEM service that provides “centralized visibility, right-sizing, and governance of permissions across clouds” and is accessed and administered from the Entra portal under Permissions Management. The Purview compliance portal is used for compliance solutions such as Compliance Manager, Information Protection, DLP, eDiscovery, and Insider Risk—not CIEM—so statement 1 is No.

Permissions Management supports multicloud environments. Microsoft documentation states that it “discovers, monitors, and manages permissions for identities and resources across Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).” It calculates a Permission Creep Index (PCI), surfaces excessive permissions, and recommends remediation across these clouds; therefore, using it to manage permissions in AWS is supported—statement 2 is Yes.

Regarding secure scores: Permissions Management focuses on entitlements (e.g., effective permissions, PCI, right-sizing actions). Microsoft Secure Score (and Identity Secure Score) are separate posture metrics exposed in Microsoft 365 Defender and Microsoft Entra ID, respectively. The Permissions Management blade does not present Microsoft Secure Score; instead, it shows CIEM-specific insights and PCI. Consequently, the claim that Secure Score can be reviewed from Permissions Management in the Entra admin center is No.

In the Microsoft 365 Defender (Microsoft Defender XDR) portal, the Reports area is the feature designed to surface security trends and provide protection status views across workloads, including identities. Microsoft guidance explains that the Reports workspace offers curated dashboards and exportable reports for specific domains (for example, Identities, Email & collaboration, Endpoints), so security teams can review trend lines, coverage/health, and status without running queries. For identities specifically (backed by Microsoft Defender for Identity), the reports include overview dashboards and scheduled/on-demand reports that show items such as identity security posture, open health issues, alert volumes over time, and sensor/coverage status. This aligns with SCI learning paths that distinguish portal areas by purpose: Secure score is a measurement of overall posture and recommended actions, Incidents is for triage and response to individual cases, and Hunting is for ad-hoc, query-driven investigations. When the task is to “view security trends and track the protection status of identities,” Microsoft directs administrators to the Reports > Identities experience in the Defender portal, which provides the built-in, continuously updated visualizations and summaries required for ongoing monitoring.