SC-300 - Implement Authentication and Access Management (25% of the exam) - Section 2.3

Plan and implement Microsoft Entra Conditional Access policy assignments and controls.

Design Conditional Access policies by combining assignment conditions - users, cloud apps, locations, devices - with grant and session controls. Use report-only mode to assess policy impact before enforcement and apply authentication context to require step-up verification for sensitive actions.

Conditional Access policy assignmentsgrant and session controlspolicy templatesauthentication contextreport-only mode

Practice question for this objective

Free sampleImplement Authentication and Access Managementhard

An identity team is preparing a tenant-wide Conditional Access policy that will require phishing-resistant multifactor authentication for every user signing in to all cloud apps. The tenant keeps two cloud-only emergency access accounts that must never be locked out by the policy, and the team must confirm the policy's real-world impact before any user is actually challenged. Which TWO configuration steps should the team apply before enforcing the policy? Select TWO.

  • AAdd the two emergency access accounts to the Users assignment exclusion so the grant control is never evaluated against those break-glass accounts. Correct
  • BSet the policy state to report-only so sign-in logs record how the policy would evaluate for each sign-in without enforcing the grant control on users. Correct
  • CEnable security defaults alongside the policy so the tenant gains a baseline multifactor requirement while the new Conditional Access policy is validated.
  • DAdd a trusted named location to the policy conditions so sign-ins from the corporate network bypass the phishing-resistant requirement during validation.
Safe Conditional Access rollout excludes break-glass accounts in the Users assignment and uses report-only mode to measure impact before enforcement. Excluding the cloud-only emergency access accounts in the Users assignment ensures a faulty grant control can never block tenant recovery, and report-only mode evaluates the policy and logs the would-be outcome per sign-in without challenging users, so impact is measured first. Security defaults conflict with custom Conditional Access policies and offer no exclusions or reporting, and a trusted named location merely scopes the grant rather than safeguarding accounts or capturing impact.

Why A is correct: Excluding the emergency accounts in the Users assignment keeps them outside the grant control, so a misconfigured phishing-resistant requirement can never lock the tenant out of recovery.

Why B is correct: Report-only mode evaluates the policy and writes the would-be result to the sign-in logs while granting access normally, letting the team measure impact before turning enforcement on.

Why C is wrong: Security defaults cannot run while custom Conditional Access policies are enabled, and they offer no exclusions or report-only evaluation, so they neither protect break-glass accounts nor measure impact.

Why D is wrong: A trusted named location only changes which sign-ins the grant applies to and does nothing to protect emergency accounts or to capture the policy's impact before enforcement.

See more SC-300 practice questions, answers explained.

Exam traps in Implement Authentication and Access Management

Answers that look right on this material and are not. Each one is a distractor from a different question in the SC-300 bank for this domain.

  • Security defaults, because they activate Microsoft's recommended protections for the tenant in one switch

    Why it is wrong: Security defaults apply a fixed Microsoft baseline with no per-policy tuning, and they cannot coexist with Conditional Access policies or run in report-only mode, so they do not provide a guided starting point to refine.

  • User actions, scoped to the register security information action so the control applies to sensitive content

    Why it is wrong: User actions cover predefined operations such as registering security information or device join, not access to specific sensitive pages inside a business application, so this would not match the scenario.

  • Select Grant access and choose Require one of the selected controls so both options are evaluated together

    Why it is wrong: Require one of the selected controls applies OR logic, so a user satisfying either multifactor authentication or device compliance would be granted access, which does not enforce both.

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