Advanced Zero Trust with Microsoft 365
Solution overview
Enterprises deploying Zero Trust often end up with policy sprawl: conditional access rules, device compliance policies, and detection rules built in isolation, with no proof they work together or that any one of them could lock administrators out. This lab series takes the opposite approach: it builds a small, intentional set of controls across identity, endpoint, and data, and proves each one with real evidence before it's ever enforced.
Across three progressive labs, learners design a persona-based Conditional Access architecture in Entra ID, validating a phishing-resistant admin grant and risk-based remediation policies in report-only mode against real sign-in telemetry rather than assumption. They then close the device-trust gap by feeding Microsoft Defender for Endpoint's live risk score into Intune compliance, making device health a real-time access condition enforced through Conditional Access with automatic self-healing once the device remediates.
The capstone ties it together: a safe, simulated five-stage attack chain — phishing, token theft, an endpoint foothold, a privilege-escalation attempt, and data exfiltration — run against the exact architecture built in Labs 1 and 2. Each stage is defended by a specific, already-proven control, and Microsoft Defender XDR correlates the signals into one incident, hunted with KQL and optionally automated with a Sentinel playbook.
The result is a fully implemented, evidence-based Zero Trust architecture, not a checklist of enabled features, along with a before-and-after Secure Score delta learners can use to make the business case in their own environment.