Microsoft Cybersecurity ArchitectStudy guide

Understand Zero Trust (verify explicitly, least privilege, assume breach) across its six defense pillars (identity/endpoints/apps/data/infrastructure/network) and the prioritized adoption path of the Rapid Modernization Plan (RaMP), from an architect’s perspective.

Understand how to align capabilities and controls to best practices using the Microsoft Cybersecurity Reference Architectures (MCRA) and the Microsoft cloud security benchmark (MCSB), designing against insider, external, and supply-chain attacks.

Understand security/governance strategy based on the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and the Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF), implementing governance via Azure landing zones, and designing a DevSecOps process aligned to CAF.

Understand a security strategy aligned to business resiliency goals, identifying and prioritizing threats to business-critical assets, secure backup & restore (BCDR) for hybrid/multicloud, ransomware mitigation (prioritizing BCDR and privileged access), and evaluating security updates.

Understand the roles of Microsoft Defender XDR (cross-domain detection/response across identity/endpoints/email/SaaS) and Microsoft Sentinel (cloud-native SIEM), an integrated XDR+SIEM detection/response design, and monitoring for hybrid/multicloud.

Understand SOAR (orchestration and automated response) with Microsoft Sentinel and Defender XDR, automation rules and playbooks, designing incident response/threat hunting/incident management workflows, and UEBA.

Understand centralized logging and auditing including Microsoft Purview Audit, monitoring design supporting hybrid/multicloud, and approaches to log ingestion, retention, and isolation.

Understand evaluating threat-detection coverage using MITRE ATT&CK matrices (Enterprise, Mobile, ICS) and designing/evaluating incident-response, threat-hunting, and incident-management workflows.

Understand identity design for hybrid/multicloud centered on Microsoft Entra ID, hybrid-identity sync/authentication options, external identities (B2B, decentralized), and identity/network/application controls for access to SaaS/PaaS/IaaS/on-prem.

Understand a modern authentication/authorization strategy including Conditional Access, continuous access evaluation (CAE), risk scoring, and protected actions; validating Conditional Access alignment with Zero Trust; AD DS hardening; and managing secrets/keys/certificates.

Understand assigning/delegating privileged roles via the enterprise access model, Entra Privileged Identity Management (PIM)/entitlement management/access reviews, cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), secure workstations for privileged access (PAW), and securing cloud-tenant administration.

Understand translating compliance requirements into security controls, addressing compliance via Microsoft Purview, privacy via Microsoft Priva, Azure Policy, and evaluating alignment with regulatory standards/benchmarks via Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

Understand posture evaluation with Microsoft Defender for Cloud (including MCSB) and Microsoft Secure Score, integrated posture across hybrid/multicloud, selecting cloud workload protection (CWPP), and integrating hybrid/multicloud via Azure Arc.

Understand requirements and priorities for a posture-management process using Microsoft Security Exposure Management (attack paths, attack-surface reduction, security insights, initiatives) and Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management (Defender EASM).

Understand securing servers/client endpoints (multi-OS, mobile, baselines, Windows LAPS), IoT/embedded and OT/ICS (Microsoft Defender for IoT), and security requirements for SaaS/PaaS/IaaS (containers, container orchestration, Azure AI services security).

Understand evaluating network designs for security alignment, Security Service Edge (SSE) including Microsoft Entra Internet Access (secure web gateway) and Microsoft Entra Private Access, and Zero Trust networking.

Understand evaluating productivity/collaboration posture with Microsoft Secure Score, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, device management with Microsoft Intune, and securing Microsoft 365 data with Microsoft Purview.

Understand evaluating data security and compliance controls for Microsoft 365 Copilot: inheritance of existing access permissions and sensitivity labels, curbing oversharing, and applying Purview auditing and DLP.

Understand evaluating the application portfolio posture, assessing business-critical apps via threat modeling, a full-lifecycle application-security strategy and secure-development standards, authentication via workload identity, API management and security, and Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Understand data discovery/classification, prioritizing data-threat mitigation, encryption at rest/in transit (Azure Key Vault, infrastructure encryption), data protection for Azure workloads (Azure SQL, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Cosmos DB) and Azure Storage, and Microsoft Defender for Storage/Databases.