Turn on MFA with security defaults or Conditional Access

If your company or business has complex security requirements or you need more granular control over your security policies, then you should consider using Conditional Access instead of security defaults to achieve a similar or higher security posture.

Conditional Access lets you create and define policies that react to sign-in events and request additional actions before a user is granted access to an application or service. Conditional Access policies can be granular and specific, empowering users to be productive wherever and whenever, but also protecting your organization.

Security defaults are available to all customers, while Conditional Access requires one of the following plans:

If you want to use Conditional Access to configure policies, see the following step-by-step guides:

To learn more about Conditional Access, see What is Conditional Access? For more information about creating Conditional Access policies, see Create a Conditional Access policy.

Note

If you have a plan or license that provides Conditional Access but haven't yet created any Conditional Access policies, you're welcome to use security defaults. However, you'll need to turn off security defaults before you can use Conditional Access policies.