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Microsoft Entra Conditional Access optimization agent

The Conditional Access optimization agent helps you ensure all users are protected by policy. It recommends policies and changes based on best practices aligned with Zero Trust and Microsoft's learnings.

In preview, the agent evaluates policies requiring multifactor authentication (MFA), enforces device based controls (device compliance, app protection policies, and Domain Joined Devices), and blocks legacy authentication and device code flow.

The agent also evaluates all existing enabled policies to propose potential consolidation of similar policies.

Prerequisites

Limitations

  • During the preview, avoid using an account to set up the agent that requires role activation with Privileged Identity Management. Using an account that doesn't have standing permissions might cause authentication failures for the agent.
  • Once agents are started, they can't be stopped or paused. It might take a few minutes to run.
  • For policy consolidation, each agent run only looks at four similar policy pairs
  • The agent currently runs as the user who enables it.
  • In preview, you should only run the agent from the Microsoft Entra admin center.

Getting started

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center as at least a Security Administrator.

  2. From the new home page, select Go to agents from the agent notification card.

    Screenshot of the Microsoft Entra admin center showcasing the new Security Copilot agents experience.

  3. Select View details under the Conditional Access Optimization Agent, then select Start agent to begin your first run.

    Screenshot showing the Conditional Access Optimization Agent configuration page.

  4. When the agent overview page loads, you see most recent and next scheduled runtimes, performance highlights, recent suggestions, and recent activity.

    Screenshot showing the Conditional Access Optimization Agent enabled in an organization.

  5. Selecting a suggestion allows you to see the proposed change, make edits, see potential policy impact.

  6. Newly created policies are created in report-only mode. As a best practice organizations should exclude their break-glass accounts from policy to avoid being locked out due to misconfiguration.

Tip

Policies created by the agent are tagged with Conditional Access Optimization Agent in the Conditional Access policies pane.

After administrators evaluate the policy settings using policy impact or report-only mode, they can move the Enable policy toggle from Report-only to On.

Reviewing results

The agent might run and:

  • Not identify any unprotected users or recommend any changes
  • Suggest creation of a new Conditional Access policy in report-only mode
  • Suggest adding newly created users to an existing policy

Providing feedback

Use the Give Microsoft feedback button at the top of the agent window to provide feedback to Microsoft about the agent.

Settings

The agent is configured to run every 24 hours based on when it's initially configured. Toggling Trigger to off under the settings page of the agent and back on at a specific time reconfigures the agent to run at that time.

Use the checkboxes under Objects to specify what the agent should monitor when making policy recommendations. By default the agent looks for both new users and applications in your tenant over the previous 24 hour period.

The agent runs under the Identity and permissions of the user who enabled the agent in your tenant. Because of this requirement you should avoid using an account that requires elevation like those that use PIM for just-in-time elevation.

You can tailor policy to your needs using the optional Custom Instructions field. This allows you to provide a prompt to the agent as part of its execution. For example: "The user "Break Glass" should be excluded from policies created." When you save the custom instruction prompt Security Copilot will attempt to interpret and the results appear in the settings page.

Remove agent

If you no longer wish to use the Conditional Access optimization agent, you can remove it using the Remove agent button at the top of the agent window.