top of page
Writer's pictureALIF Consulting

Azure RBAC

Updated: Aug 12

What is Azure RBAC?

Azure provides flexible role-based access control for Azure resources through which you can efficiently manage user's access to Azure resources, allow the level of permission, and identify their access to various resources. This access control is called Azure role-based access control, i.e., Azure RBAC.



Some scenarios for Azure Access Control (Azure RBAC)

  • Granting access to different Azure Resources with one or multiple roles. Example: Allow a user to manage Azure App and Azure SQL Service. We can give contributor, Reader, owner, Manage role, Monitor reader/contributor, website contributor etc.

  • Similarly, granting access to subscription level.

  • Example: allowing users to create only a virtual machine in a specific subscription. Or allow users to create Azure App Service and Logic (multiple) services with contribute, read or owner roles.

  • Giving different accesses to different scopes like management groups, subscriptions, resource groups or resources.

  • Granting access to an application to access resources as well.

  • We can do many relations between roles, scopes and users or groups (security principal).


Azure RBAC Type

  • In-built RBAC Roles - In-built roles are predefined by Microsoft, i.e. Owner, Contributor and Reader.

  • Custom Roles - Custom Roles are created by an admin to maintain the access and compliance policies

What can we do with RBAC?

RBAC allows you to grant access to Azure resources that you control. Suppose you need to manage access to resources in Azure for the development, engineering, and marketing teams. You’ve started to receive access requests, and you need to quickly learn how access management works for Azure resources.


Here are some scenarios you can implement with RBAC.

  • Allow one user to manage virtual machines in a subscription and another user to manage virtual networks

  • Allow a database administrator group to manage SQL databases in a subscription

  • Allow a user to manage all resources in a resource group, such as virtual machines, websites, and subnets

  • Allow an application to access all resources in a resource group


Azure RBAC Key Concepts

There are three primary components to understand for Azure role-based access control: Security principal (who), Role (what), and Scope(where).

The security Principal represents who is going to get access, like users,groups, service principals, and managed identity. (Who are)



Azure RBAC key concepts

The role is a definition of collections of permissions

like, read, contribute, owner, delete, etc.


Azure RBAC Scope

The scope is the set of resources that the access applies to. When we assign a role, we can further limit the actions allowed by defining a scope. This is helpful if we want to make someone a Website Contributor, but only for one resource group.


In Azure, we can specify a scope at four levels: management group, subscription, resource group, or resource. Scopes are structured in a parent-child relationship. You can assign roles at any of these levels of scope.


Azure RBAC Scope


The relationship between security principles, role definition, and scope is a kind of many-to-many.

We can assign a role(s) to a user or group at a certain scope for access control and, again, can be revoked by removing a role assignment.

  • We can assign the same role to multiple users, groups, or managed identities on the same or different resources (scope).

  • We can assign roles using Azure Portal, Azure SDKs, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell or REST APIs.








489 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page