What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on PA-7 Follow just enough administration (least privilege) principle?

Role definitions in use with their permission scope; Assignment inventory showing scope of each assignment; Evidence of custom roles replacing broad built-in roles; Report on unused permissions identified and removed.

What is the most common gap auditors find on PA-7?

owner or contributor granted at subscription scope as a default

Azure Security Benchmark v3 (renamed Microsoft cloud security benchmark) · Privileged Access

`PA-7` Follow just enough administration (least privilege) principle

Apply just enough administration by managing permissions at fine granularity, using role-based access control to grant only the access a role needs.

Source: Azure Security Benchmark v3 (renamed Microsoft cloud security benchmark), PA-7. 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

Evidence of custom roles replacing broad built-in roles · Identity provider / directory
Report on unused permissions identified and removed · Identity provider / directory

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Role definitions in use with their permission scope · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Assignment inventory showing scope of each assignment · 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

owner or contributor granted at subscription scope as a default
custom roles never created so broad built-ins are the only option
permission usage never analysed so grants only ever grow

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

PA-6 Use privileged access workstations · PA-8 Determine access process for cloud provider support