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Up until fairly recently I have been managing  access to a number of Azure subscriptions but as I’ve been working for smaller organisations the number of people who needed access was fairly small and easy to manage. It also meant that I generally gave the users Owner or Contributor access to the subscriptions as we were all managing everything so we needed the access at that level. Now I work for a large organisation there is a greater need to  limit access to certain areas of Azure and giving subscription wide access is limited to a few key administrators. This means that I need to look at the minimum access that is required for each of the users who need access to the resources. First I’d like to talk about the scope within which permissions can be set within Azure. For most of the scenarios I’ve worked in I have visibility of a single subscription. For organisations  with a large number of subscriptions there is a further level of scope, Management group, which I won’t be discussing.

Permissions can be set at the Subscription, Resource group or the individual resource scope.Depending upon the level of access your user requires there are three basic levels which you can use

• Owner
• Contributor
• Reader

Owner gives the user full access to everything within the scope and can also assign roles to other users.

Contributor gives the user full access to everything within the scope except they are not able to assign roles to other users

Reader give the user access to view the resources within the scope but they are not able to change anything or assign roles.

So assigning the user the Owner role at the Subscription level, then the user can manage all resources within the subscription and assign roles to users. A user can be assigned multiple roles and Azure RBAC is additive so if a user was assigned Contributor at the subscription scope but only Reader on one of the resource groups, the Contributor role would override the reader role. It is also possible to have Deny role assignments. Where a user is Denied permissions on a specific role. Deny assignments take precedence over role assignments.

These roles plus the variety of scopes give some flexibility of access but it is still a large surface area of access that is provided. Azure offers a large number of finer grained roles to allow users to be given specific permissions to specific services. There are a large number of built in assignments as can be seen here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/role-based-access-control/built-in-roles

These finer grained roles allow you to set specific permissions on a specific user within a specific scope. For example if  you wanted to give a user access to a blob store to upload files via the Azure portal there are two permissions that can be set: Reader and Data Access and

Storage Blob Data Contributor. If you assign these two roles to a user in the storage account, then the user is able to login to the Azure portal and navigate to the storage account and access the blob store.

To do this, navigate to the storage account within which you want to assign a role and click the access control item

The click “Add role assignment”

In the role drop down pick “Storage Blob Data Contributor”, select the user you want to assign the role to and click save. Repeat this for the Reader and Data Access role. Your user now has access only to blob storage and has no access elsewhere in the resource group or subscription. I could have done the same thing by selecting the resource group and Access control and adding these roles there. This would have give the user access to all blob stores within the resource group.

Another example is that you may want to give someone access to your app service so that they can configure and deploy. So navigate to your App Service and click “Access control”, then select the role “Website Contributor”. See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/role-based-access-control/built-in-roles#website-contributor for more details. This lets you manage the selected website but not app service plans and no other web sites. If you want to manage other app services then you could add the same role at the resource group level.