What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on IM-2 Protect identity and authentication systems?

Privileged directory role assignment list and review records; Strong authentication enforcement for all privileged roles; Identity secure score or equivalent posture measurement; Alerting on high risk identity activity.

What is the most common gap auditors find on IM-2?

directory admin roles held permanently by many accounts

Azure Security Benchmark v3 (renamed Microsoft cloud security benchmark) · Identity Management

`IM-2` Protect identity and authentication systems

Treat the identity and authentication system as a high priority asset, restricting privileged roles, requiring strong authentication for privileged access and monitoring high risk activity.

Source: Azure Security Benchmark v3 (renamed Microsoft cloud security benchmark), IM-2. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open Azure Security Benchmark v3 (renamed Microsoft cloud security benchmark) in the compliance library.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

hard

to go live

Policy repository / GRC workspace

where the evidence lives

teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review. To go live: easy when half or more of the artefacts are already held by a system, moderate from a quarter to a half, hard below a quarter.

These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.

system holds itEvidence a system already holds

none for this control

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Privileged directory role assignment list and review records · Identity provider / directory

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Strong authentication enforcement for all privileged roles · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Identity secure score or equivalent posture measurement · Document repository
Alerting on high risk identity activity · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

No system holds this evidence for you: it is people and documents. Reminders and routing to the owner still save time. Put the document under version control with an owner and review date, and log each review as a record with reviewer and date.

Common gaps auditors find

directory admin roles held permanently by many accounts
privileged accounts exempt from strong authentication for convenience
identity system telemetry not monitored separately from workload logs

Do this for your whole sheet

Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.

Build my evidence sheet

IM-1 Use centralized identity and authentication system · IM-3 Manage application identities securely and automatically