Pass the Microsoft Microsoft Certified: Security Compliance and Identity Fundamentals SC-900 Questions and answers with CertsForce

Sensitivity labels can apply content markings (headers, footers, and watermarks) to documents and emails, and can also enforce encryption and access controls. When configuring a label, you can specify the watermark text, size, and placement so that protected content is visibly marked according to your organization’s policy.

The Compliance score in Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager is a measurement tool that evaluates an organization’s progress toward meeting data protection and regulatory compliance requirements. It is specifically designed to help organizations reduce risks related to data governance, privacy, and compliance with various standards such as GDPR, ISO 27001, NIST 800-53, and Microsoft Data Protection Baselines.

According to Microsoft’s official documentation on Compliance Manager, the Compliance score “helps organizations track, improve, and demonstrate their compliance posture by providing a quantifiable measure of compliance with regulations and standards.” Each action within Compliance Manager contributes a certain number of points to the overall score. These points are weighted based on risk, meaning that actions with a greater impact on reducing compliance risk contribute more significantly to the total score.

The score is not an absolute measure of legal compliance but rather an indicator of progress toward implementing recommended controls and risk-reducing actions. Microsoft emphasizes that Compliance score “assists organizations in identifying areas of improvement, prioritizing compliance tasks, and maintaining an auditable record of their compliance activities.”

By contrast, Microsoft Secure Score measures security posture related to identity, device, and application protection, while Productivity Score evaluates collaboration and technology experience. Thus, the metric that specifically assesses data protection and regulatory compliance progress is the Compliance score in Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager.

Microsoft describes Azure Policy as the built-in governance service that lets you “create, assign, and manage policies” to enforce organizational standards and “assess compliance at scale.” It continuously evaluates existing resources for compliance and can take effect-enforcement actions such as deny, append, or modify during create/update operations. Azure Policy “helps you audit and enforce your standards” across subscriptions and resource groups, and its compliance dashboard shows overall and per-policy compliance states for all resources. By contrast, Azure Blueprints focuses on orchestrating deployments of artifacts (such as policy assignments, role assignments, and templates) for new environments; Microsoft guidance positions Policy as the engine that evaluates and enforces those standards on existing resources. Sentinel is a SIEM/SOAR for security analytics, and Anomaly Detector is a Cognitive Service—not a governance/compliance enforcement tool. Therefore, to assess compliance and enforce standards for existing Azure resources, the prescribed control plane is Azure Policy with its evaluation cycle, initiative (policy set) support, and remediation tasks.

The Content Search tool in the Security & Compliance Center can be used to quickly find email in Exchange mailboxes, documents in SharePoint sites and OneDrive locations, and instant messaging conversations in Skype for Business.

The first step is to starting using the Content Search tool to choose content locations to search and configure a keyword query to search for specific items.

 Microsoft Defender for Cloud can detect vulnerabilities and threats for Azure Storage. Yes

 Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is available for all Azure subscriptions. Yes

 Microsoft Defender for Cloud can evaluate the security of workloads deployed to Azure or on-premises. Yes

Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides both workload protection and posture management. For Azure Storage, the Defender plan (Microsoft Defender for Storage) offers threat detection such as anomalous access, malware scanning, and sensitive-data threat alerts, while the CSPM guidance in Defender for Cloud flags misconfigurations that create vulnerabilities (for example, public blob access, weak TLS settings). CSPM capabilities—secure score, recommendations, and baseline assessments—are available to all Azure subscriptions (foundational CSPM), giving every tenant visibility into security posture without requiring a premium add-on for basic posture features. Beyond Azure, Defender for Cloud supports hybrid and multicloud: using Azure Arc and the Defender for Servers plan, it can onboard and assess on-premises servers and resources in other clouds, applying recommendations, security assessments, and threat protections across those environments. Collectively, these capabilities confirm that Defender for Cloud can detect storage-related threats and posture weaknesses, CSPM is broadly available to Azure subscriptions, and the service evaluates workloads running in Azure or on-premises.

Microsoft’s identity platform (Microsoft Entra ID, formerly Azure AD) supports built-in and custom directory roles. The official guidance states that you can “create your own custom roles to grant permissions for management of Microsoft Entra resources,” and those roles consist of specific role permissions that you select to tailor least-privilege administration. The documentation also lists Global administrator (formerly Company Administrator) as a built-in role that “has access to all administrative features” and can delegate role assignments, reset passwords for all users, and manage identity settings across the tenant. Regarding assignments, Microsoft is explicit that role assignment is many-to-many: administrators can “assign one or more roles to a user,” and the user’s effective permissions are the union of the privileges from all assigned roles. Consequently, (1) creating custom roles is supported (Yes), (2) Global administrator is indeed a defined Azure AD/Microsoft Entra role (Yes), and (3) a user being limited to only one role is incorrect (No) because multiple role assignments to the same user are permitted and commonly used to implement least privilege and separation of duties.

Box 1: Yes

Azure AD supports custom roles.

Box 2: Yes

Global Administrator has access to all administrative features in Azure Active Directory. Box 3: No

Microsoft states that Security defaults are baseline protections in Azure Active Directory (now Microsoft Entra ID) that “make it easier to help protect your organization from identity-related attacks.” One of the core behaviors is that security defaults “require all users to register for Azure AD Multi-Factor Authentication,” and enforce “multi-factor authentication for all users,” with special emphasis that “administrators are required to do multi-factor authentication.” Security defaults also “block legacy authentication” and add protections for privileged operations, but the universal control that applies to every user is MFA. Importantly, enabling security defaults does not turn on paid capabilities such as Azure AD Identity Protection or Privileged Identity Management (PIM); those are separate, premium features. The baseline is intentionally simple and tenant-wide: require MFA registration, challenge with MFA when risk or sensitive operations are detected, and reduce exposure by disabling legacy protocols. Therefore, when you enable security defaults, multi-factor authentication (MFA) will be enabled for all Azure AD users, aligning with Microsoft’s guidance that security defaults “help protect all organizations by requiring MFA and disabling legacy authentication.”

YES YES YES

Microsoft Entra Conditional Access is explicitly described by Microsoft as a system of policies that act as if-then statements: if a user wants to access a resource, then certain controls must be satisfied. These are called Conditional Access policies, and they combine assignments and access controls to enforce organizational requirements.

Among the configurable conditions in a policy is Device platforms. The documentation explains that Conditional Access identifies the device platform (Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux) from the user agent and notes that this condition is typically used with grant controls such as block access or in combination with other controls. This allows administrators to block or allow access based specifically on the operating system of the user’s device.

For scoping, the Users and groups assignment lets you include or exclude groups instead of individual users. Microsoft’s Entra groups overview states that you can create a Conditional Access policy that applies to a group, and that Entra supports both security groups and Microsoft 365 groups, while another architecture article notes that either a security group or a Microsoft 365 Group can be used in Conditional Access policies.

In Microsoft’s shared responsibility model, responsibilities vary by service type. For IaaS (for example, Azure Virtual Machines), Microsoft states that it is responsible for protecting and maintaining the cloud infrastructure that runs customer workloads, while customers secure what they deploy in that infrastructure. Microsoft’s guidance explains that Microsoft “operates and secures the datacenters, physical hosts, networking, and the virtualization fabric,” and handles the underlying platform maintenance, including “hardware and firmware” that support those hosts. Conversely, customers are responsible for what runs inside their VM: “the guest operating system (including updates and security configuration), applications, identity, and data.”

Applied to the options in this question:

Updating the operating system and updating installed applications are customer tasks because they are inside the guest VM.

Configuring permissions for shared folders is also a customer responsibility because it’s an OS/application configuration within the guest.

Updating the firmware of the disk controller belongs to Microsoft, because firmware and hardware on the physical hosts (including storage controllers) are part of the infrastructure of the cloud that Microsoft manages and secures.

This aligns with SCI study materials that summarize: Microsoft secures “the security of the cloud” (physical datacenter, hosts, network, and hypervisor/firmware), while customers secure “security in the cloud” (guest OS, apps, and data).