Microsoft has announced that it will automatically enable stricter secure default settings known as ‘security defaults’ on all existing Azure Active Directory tenants in late June 2022.
First introduced in October 2019 only for new tenants, security defaults are a set of basic security mechanisms designed to introduce good identity security hygiene with a minimum of effort, even for organizations that don’t have an IT team.
Two months later, in January 2020, Microsoft announced that security defaults already had been enabled for 60,000 new tenants.
“We are delighted with the success of this program, but tenants created before October 2019 were not included in security defaults and were vulnerable unless they explicitly enabled features like Conditional Access, Identity Protection, and MFA,” said Alex Weinert, Director of Identity Security at Microsoft.
“That’s why we’re so excited to announce the rollout of security defaults to existing tenants, targeting those who haven’t changed any security settings since deployment.”
Admins who don’t want security defaults enabled for their organizations can disable them through the Azure Active Directory properties or the Microsoft 365 admin center.
