Free Microsoft SC-900 Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 5

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is the Microsoft 365 solution designed to protect users from threats delivered through email and collaboration workloads. SCI training material explains that Defender for Office 365 protects Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business by detecting and blocking malware, phishing, and other advanced attacks that use messages and shared content as the delivery channel.

A key capability is Safe Links, which specifically protects against malicious URLs. When a user receives an email, Teams chat message, or channel post that contains a hyperlink, Safe Links scans and rewrites that URL. At the moment the user clicks, the link is checked again; if it is identified as malicious or leads to a known phishing or malware-hosting site, access is blocked and a warning page is shown. This time-of-click protection is emphasized in Microsoft’s security documentation as a primary defense against weaponized links in email and collaborative communications.

By comparison, Microsoft Defender for Identity focuses on detecting identity-related threats in on-premises Active Directory, Defender for Endpoint protects devices and endpoints, and Defender for Cloud Apps secures SaaS applications and shadow IT. None of these are the primary solution for blocking malicious links in email, chats, and channels. Therefore, the correct choice is Microsoft Defender for Office 365.

Microsoft’s SCI learning content describes the Microsoft 365 Defender portal as a unified security operations experience that surfaces security posture and active threats on a card-based dashboard. In the overview of the portal, Microsoft explains that the home page “presents key security information in dashboard cards,” and that among these cards are summaries that highlight risky entities such as “Users at risk” and “Devices at risk.” These cards provide quick, actionable visibility for analysts by aggregating detections and exposure data across Microsoft Defender services (for identities and endpoints). The guidance emphasizes that the portal “correlates signals across identities, endpoints, email, and applications” and that security teams can use the dashboard cards to pivot directly into incidents and investigations from “Users at risk” or “Devices at risk” to take containment or remediation actions.

By contrast, Compliance Score is part of Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager, not the Microsoft 365 Defender portal; Service Health and User Management are functions of the Microsoft 365 admin center. Therefore, the cards you’ll find on the Microsoft 365 Defender portal that match the choices provided are Users at risk and Devices at risk.

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager is a feature in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal that helps you manage your organization’s compliance requirements with greater ease and convenience. Compliance Manager can help you throughout your compliance journey, from taking inventory of your data protection risks to managing the complexities of implementing controls, staying current with regulations and certifications, and reporting to auditors.

Watch the video below to learn how Compliance Manager can help simplify how your organization manages compliance:

Compliance Manager helps simplify compliance and reduce risk by providing:

Pre-built assessments for common industry and regional standards and regulations, or custom assessments to meet your unique compliance needs (available assessments depend on your licensing agreement; learn more).

Workflow capabilities to help you efficiently complete your risk assessments through a single tool.

Detailed step-by-step guidance on suggested improvement actions to help you comply with the standards and regulations that are most relevant for your organization. For actions that are managed by Microsoft, you’ll see implementation details and audit results.

A risk-based compliance score to help you understand your compliance posture by measuring your progress in completing improvement actions.

In Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, to search, preserve, analyze, and export content, you must first create a case. A case acts as a container for all eDiscovery activities, including placing users and content locations on litigation hold, running content searches, and exporting results for legal or compliance review.

SCI Extract: "Cases are used in Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Standard and Premium) to manage, organize, and execute the various tasks associated with identifying and delivering content during an investigation or litigation."

Microsoft documents describe Azure Bastion as a managed PaaS jump-host that’s deployed inside a virtual network to provide secure remote access: “Azure Bastion is deployed in your virtual network and provides seamless RDP and SSH connectivity to your virtual machines directly in the Azure portal over SSL.” The platform design is per-VNet, with the limit stated as: “One Bastion host can be deployed per virtual network,” ensuring a single managed entry point for that network. Connectivity is delivered using the native protocols while avoiding public exposure: “Bastion enables RDP and SSH sessions… without requiring a public IP on your virtual machines, using TLS (port 443).” Access is brokered through the web experience: “You connect to the VM directly from the Azure portal using your browser,” which provides an HTML5 client for RDP/SSH. These statements collectively validate that (1) deployment is one Bastion per VNet, (2) it provides secure user connections by using RDP (and SSH), and (3) it provides a secure connection to an Azure VM via the Azure portal, aligning with Zero Trust principles by eliminating inbound RDP/SSH exposure on public IPs.

Microsoft’s official description of Azure Key Vault in the Security, Compliance, and Identity learning materials states that Key Vault is “a cloud service for securely storing and accessing secrets.” The same guidance clarifies that “a secret is anything you want to tightly control, such as API keys, passwords, or connection strings.” In addition to secrets, Key Vault provides key management: “Azure Key Vault helps safeguard cryptographic keys and secrets used by cloud applications and services.” It further explains that organizations can “generate, import, rotate, disable, and delete keys” and use them for operations such as “encrypt and decrypt, sign and verify, wrap and unwrap.” These excerpts confirm that Key Vault’s core capabilities include the secure storage and lifecycle management of secrets and cryptographic keys.

By contrast, the SCI content makes clear that infrastructure features like Azure DDoS Protection and Network Security Groups (NSGs) are networking/security controls delivered by Azure networking services, not Key Vault. Likewise, ARM templates are deployment artifacts stored in repositories such as Azure Repos or GitHub; Key Vault does not store or manage template files. Therefore, the two correct actions you can perform with Azure Key Vault—aligned with Microsoft’s documentation—are to store (and manage) keys and store (and manage) secrets.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint includes Automated investigation and remediation (AIR) and Attack surface reduction (ASR) as core capabilities. Microsoft’s guidance states that AIR “uses inspection algorithms and playbooks to examine alerts, determine if they are malicious, and then take remediation actions such as stopping processes, quarantining files, and rolling back changes.” It is designed to “reduce the volume of alerts that require analyst attention and to remediate threats at machine speed across your estate,” helping security teams contain and fix issues without manual intervention.

Defender for Endpoint also provides attack surface reduction features to proactively limit exposure. The Microsoft learn materials describe that ASR “helps organizations minimize areas that attackers can exploit,” and includes “attack surface reduction rules, network protection, web protection, application control (Windows Defender Application Control), and controlled folder access.” These controls “block or constrain risky behaviors and common attacker techniques,” thereby preventing many initial compromise and lateral-movement attempts before they generate incidents.

By contrast, transport encryption is a general platform/security baseline capability rather than a specific Defender for Endpoint feature, and shadow IT detection is addressed through Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps (App discovery), which can use Defender for Endpoint network signals but is not itself a native MDE capability. Therefore, the two correct capabilities of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint are Automated investigation and remediation and Attack surface reduction.

Microsoft documents describe Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management (PIM) as the service that delivers approval-based, time-limited elevation to privileged roles. Official guidance states: “Privileged Identity Management (PIM) enables you to manage, control, and monitor access to important resources in Microsoft Entra ID, Azure, and Microsoft 365.” PIM specifically supports just-in-time and time-bound activations: “PIM provides just-in-time privileged access to Microsoft Entra roles and Azure resources” and “allows you to make access time-bound by setting start and end dates.” It also supports approval workflows: “You can require approval to activate privileged roles, and designate approvers to receive and approve requests.” Additional controls include “require multi-factor authentication to activate, provide a justification, and ticket number,” and auditing: “PIM records all activations and changes for review and alerting.”

By contrast, Microsoft Entra ID Protection focuses on risk detections and automated remediation, not role elevation workflows. Conditional Access enforces access policies at sign-in and session but does not provide approval-based role activation. Access Reviews help you “review and attest to continued access” but do not supply just-in-time elevation. Therefore, the Microsoft Purview/Entra feature that implements approval-based, time-bound role activation is Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management (PIM).

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