Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) Practice Exam

What technology allows you to securely connect applications to Azure Active Directory?

1. MFA

2. Service Principals

3. AuthN

4. OAuth

The correct answer is: Service Principals

Choosing Service Principals as the correct answer highlights their role in securely connecting applications to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). A Service Principal is essentially an identity created for use with applications, hosted services, and automated tools to access Azure resources. This identity contains information about the application, allowing it to authenticate and authorize itself to Azure AD in a secure manner, similar to a user identity. Using Service Principals is particularly important for applications that need to interact with Azure resources without requiring user intervention, such as during automated deployments or in microservices architectures. By managing permissions and scope, Service Principals help enforce security best practices, ensuring that applications only have access to the resources they need. The other technologies mentioned serve different purposes within Azure and Azure AD. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) adds an extra layer of security for users and can be part of a broader authentication strategy but does not directly connect applications like a Service Principal does. AuthN refers to the authentication process in general and is not a specific technology for connecting applications. OAuth is a widely used authorization framework that allows applications to safely delegate access rights, but it operates on a higher level of abstraction concerning the interaction between resource servers and clients, rather than directly managing application identities in Azure AD like a Service