Least privilege in Microsoft 365 fails when admin work can’t be safely scoped. If you’re looking for solutions to support you with this, this article will help you evaluate tools for delegation boundaries, evidence, and enforcement.
In this article:
Unmanaged access privileges are a huge concern for organizations as they can be exploited by malicious actors both internally and externally within a Microsoft 365 environment. Least privilege offers one of the clearest ways to reduce this risk in M365: fewer standing permissions means fewer paths for attackers, fewer high-impact mistakes, and more defensible audits.
In M365 least privilege isn’t just about time-bounded elevation, It’s about scope – who can administer what, where, and for whom. Overly broad RBAC patterns can quietly expand blast radius when an admin account (or token) is compromised. While Microsoft offers some support in implementing least privilege, companies will need to look to third parties for comprehensive solutions.
This article explains what to look for in least privilege tools, and how to evaluate them in a way that holds up under operational pressure. Not whether they can produce another dashboard, but whether they can enforce administrative boundaries aligned to your organizational structure (region, department, business unit, or tenant) and then apply highly restricted, granular roles inside those boundaries. So, for example, an admin can be scoped to Finance in France while only being granted helpdesk-level permissions (login troubleshooting and password resets) on a global level – with audit-ready proof that both the boundary and the role restrictions are working. We’ll show where CoreView typically fits for organizations that need purpose-built scoped delegation through virtual tenant segmentation as part of M365 tenant resilience, with Corey adding AI admin assistance when it’s implemented with clear boundaries and governance.
Least privilege in Microsoft 365 (M365) isn’t (or shouldn’t be) up for debate – it’s one of the simplest ways to limit blast radius. What can trip teams up is the day-to-day mechanics of rolling it out across real people, real exceptions, and constant change in the tenant. M365 administration is still largely “wide by default”: roles that feel reasonable on paper frequently translate into tenant-wide reach in practice. In a real environment (regions, departments, agencies, subsidiaries, multiple tenants) that can quickly becomes an exposure problem you can’t explain away in an audit or a breach review.
If you can’t reliably scope who can do what – and where – you end up choosing between two bad options. You either centralize privileged work into a handful of “super users” (which means slow response, constant bottlenecks, shadow admin workarounds), or you spread privilege access to keep the business moving (which means bigger attack surface, higher mistake impact, weaker evidence).
This article will help you pick tools based on the hard requirements – scoped delegation, continuous visibility, and audit-ready proof – so least privilege remains enforceable during everyday work and emergencies, and isn’t just something that looks good on paper.
Deploying least privilege means users, admins, and applications get only the access they need, for only as long as they need it, and with audit-ready evidence that the access was appropriate.
In M365, privilege mistakes scale fast:
Microsoft Entra ID and M365 provide meaningful basics for managing privileged access. Many teams start there, and they should.
However, the gaps start to show up when you try to enforce least privilege aligned to organizational structure.
Role-based access control (RBAC) is often broad by design for workload administration. Most organizations will likely find they need admin scope limited to a department, region, or business unit, not “all SharePoint” or “all Exchange Online.” While administrative units can help scope certain directory administration scenarios, they may not map cleanly to workload-by-workload boundaries.
We’ve seen how challenging this can be with a number of customers. A large public-sector organization began rolling out Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels and quickly hit an operational reality: certain high-impact actions – such as removing a label or encryption after a user mistake – were effectively gated behind a small set of central “super user” administrators using admin portals and scripting. This caused day-to-day support requests to pile up for the super users, and the security team faced an unhealthy tradeoff: either slow the business down, or broaden privileged access so more people could clear exceptions.
The takeaway was clear: when privileged tasks are centralized but frequent, organizations drift toward over-privileging. Modern privileged access governance has tomust make these types of actions manageable with tight scope, clear approval, and audit-ready evidence. Without this, operational demand becomes the reason least privilege fails in practice.
Another example was in a multi-agency environment that was operating under shared M365 infrastructure. Each agency needed to perform real security operations – such as reviewing quarantine items and running message traces – to respond quickly to user reports and potential incidents. But the native administrative experience made safe delegation difficult: giving someone access to the tools often risked giving them visibility into (or control over) data outside their agency’s scope. This created governance and compliance concerns.
The team’s conclusion was that “least privilege” isn’t only about time-bound elevation, it’s about enforcing boundaries so security staff can investigate and act without seeing everything. This is hugely important because incident response speed is non-negotiable, and any unnecessary admin visibility becomes a liability during audits and breach investigations. The right privileged access approach enables fast security action and provable containment of who could access what.
If you’re looking for a least privilege tool for M365, this checklist will help you focus on what is critical. If a vendor can’t show these capabilities in your tenant, treat it as a warning sign.
Look for:
Buyer questions:
Look for:
Buyer questions:
Look for:
(This is the point where many tools stay high-level, or stop at RBAC-only approaches.)
Look for:
Buyer questions:
In 2026, many products will claim “AI.” Push for specifics:
If your privilege model is too broad, your organization will face the following risks:
Least privilege tool projects tend to fail for one of two reasons: teams start with features instead of a privilege model, or they roll out controls without a way to prove they reduced risk. The steps below are designed to keep you out of both traps. You’ll define who needs admin power (and where), baseline today’s reality, pressure-test vendors against specific scoping questions, then phase enforcement so you can measure progress without breaking day-to-day operations.
Deliverable:
Deliverable:
Test these questions live:
If a tool can’t answer these without heavy custom work, treat that as a scope limitation.
Deliverable:
This section is a buyer’s orientation, not an endorsement. Ensure that you validate fit in your specific tenant.
Best fit: Organzations prioritizing SaaS operations workflows and policy-driven automation that includes M365.
Best fit: Enterprises managing complex or multi-tenant M365 environments that need scoped, delegated administration (“virtual tenant” segmentation) plus continuous visibility into privileged exposure and configuration drift – with audit-ready reporting to prove controls are working over time.
Best fit: Teams that want reporting, auditing, and operational administration for M365.
Best fit: Enterprises standardizing governance controls across identity and M365 operations.
Best fit: Organizations investing in M365 governance and compliance programs, especially for collaboration workloads.
Best fit: Identity and directory operations teams that need structured administration and delegation patterns.
Best fit: Teams that want fast M365 reporting and audit visibility at a reasonable operational overhead.
Most least privilege efforts fail at the boundary problem: “How do I let admins do their job without giving them tenant-wide access?”
CoreView addresses this with virtual tenant segmentation that creates administrative boundaries inside M365. What CoreView enables you to do is to create essentially a virtual segment of your tenant, and assign administrative access permissions within that virtual segment. We call it virtual tenant segmentation.
What virtual segmentation means in practice:
CoreView also has Corey, the world’s first AI administrator for Microsoft 365, designed to help admins query posture and take guided action with review-first controls.
Use cases aligned to least privilege and incident response:
Microsoft provides building blocks (RBAC roles, PIM/JIT elevation, access reviews, Conditional Access), but it doesn’t “enforce” least privilege end-to-end – especially when you need admin work scoped to real organizational boundaries like region, department, agency, or subsidiary. Most teams still have to design the operating model and fill gaps with process and/or third-party tooling.
No. JIT controls when someone can elevate, but least privilege also depends on scope – where and on what they can act (specific users, sites, mailboxes, business units, or tenants). Many environments fail “least privilege” even with JIT because effective scope remains tenant-wide.
You need delegation controls that map admin permissions to business boundaries (department/region/business unit/agency) and limit both visibility and actions within that scope. If your approach only reduces role count but doesn’t constrain scope, you’re still exposed to lateral access when an admin account (or token) is compromised.
Ask vendors to prove scope in your tenant with live queries like: “Who can administer SharePoint for finance in France?” and “Show me admins whose effective scope exceeds their job function.” If the answer requires heavy custom scripting, manual group intervention, or adding extra tenants, treat it as a practical limitation.
At minimum: privileged role assignment deltas (humans and apps), standing vs. elevated access, approval records tied to business intent, and an exceptions register with justification and expiry. The key test is whether you can produce “who had what access, when, why, and who approved it” without a last-minute reporting scramble.
CoreView is designed for the “boundary problem”: it supports scoped delegation through virtual tenant segmentation so admins can only see and act within their granted segment (e.g., by region/department/function), plus continuous visibility into privileged exposure and audit-ready reporting. Corey adds guided, review-first admin assistance with consistent logging when deployed with clear governance.
