Kartik Kanakasabesan on The Oops Factor

Talking to Kartik about his love of reading & science fiction (Isaac Asimov, anyone?), as well as touching on development tools, capabilities & limitations. Technology moves on in interesting ways!


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The story of MFA & the Centre of Excellence

I’ve been rolling out the Microsoft Centre of Excellence solution for several years now at customers. It’s a great place to start getting a handle on what exactly is going on within a Power Platform tenant, though there’s obviously so much more that takes place within a Centre of Excellence team.

The solution gathers telemetry around environments, Power Apps, Power Automates etc through the usage of the Power Automate Admin connectors for Power Platform (see Power Platform for Admins – Connectors | Microsoft Learn for further information on these).

Now obviously we need a user account to run these, and this usually has been through the use of a ‘pseudo service account’, as using a service principal has been tricky, to say the least. So we would get customers to set up an appropriate account with licensing & permissions in place, and use this to own & run the Power Automate flows that bring in the information to the CoE solution.

It is important to note that usage of these connectors do require a pretty high level of permissions – in fact, we usually suggest applying the Power Platform Admin security role (within the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre) to the user account. All good so far.

The tricky part has, to date, been around security. Organisations usually require (for good reasons) multi-factor authentication to be in place (aka MFA). Now this is fine for users logging in & accessing systems. However, it proves to be somewhat tricker for automations.

See, when a user logs in & authenticates through MFA, a token is stored to allow them to access systems. Automations can also use this. However the token will expire at some point (based on how each organisations has implemented MFA access/controls). When the token expires, the automations will stop running, and fail silently. There’s no prompt that the token has expired, and the only way of knowing is to take a look at the Power Automate flow history. This can be interesting though, as signing in (with the pseudo service account) will prompt for MFA authentication, and then everything will start running again!

So this has usually resulted in conversations with the client to politely point out that implementing MFA on the service account will mean that, at some point, the Power Automate flows are going to start failing. Discussions with security teams take place, mitigation using tools such as Azure Sentinel are implemented, and things move ahead (cautiously). It’s been, to date, the most annoying pain for the technical implementation (that I can think of at least, in my experience).

Now you’d think that a change in this would be shouted from the rooftops, people talking about it, social media blowing up, etc. Well, I was starting an implementation recently for a customer, and was talking to them around this, as I’d usually do. Imagine my surprise when Todd, one of the Microsoft technical people attached to the client, asked why we weren’t recommending MFA.

Taking a look at the online documentation, I noticed that something had slipped in. Finally there was the ability to use MFA!

Trawling back through the GitHub history (after all, I wanted to find out EXACTLY when this had slipped in), I discovered that it was a few months old. I was still very surprised that there hadn’t been more publicity around this (though definately a good incentive to write about it, and a great blog post to start off 2023 with!).

So moving forward, we’re now able to use MFA for the CoE user account. This is definately going to put a lot of mind at rest (especially those who are in security and/or governance). The specifics around the MFA implementation can be found at Conditional access and multi-factor authentication in Flow – Power Automate | Microsoft Learn – but it’s important to note that specific MFA policies will need to be set up & implemented for this account.

So, now the job will be to retro-fit this to all organisations that already have the CoE toolkit in place. Thankfully this shouldn’t be too difficult to do, and will most definitely enhance the security controls around it!

Have you implemented any mitigation in the past to handle non-MFA? I’m curious if you have – please drop a comment below!

Adam Belak on The Oops Factor

Talking to Adam about how he decided (together with the AMAZING Kaila) to start up a new Microsoft conference, and the MAJOR twist that they’re bringing with it! Also covering a vehicle accident that he was involved in, & how it changed his life

Make sure to also check out https://www.iberiansummit.com/ and register for it!


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Daniel Laskewitz on The Oops Factor

Finding out from Daniel about his love of beer & getting into brewing (he just ‘may’ happen to have decided on a name to use for the brand if it goes commercial), how he first started to technology, & what he is REALLY an expert in!


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Eswar Prakash on The Oops Factor

Talking to Eswar about his dual love of AI & music (some interesting correlations!), & covering what could happen with specific commands being used on a NON-Microsoft system…


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Damien Bird on The Oops Factor

Talking to the community legend that’s Damien about his vegetable garden, how he got into gardening in the first place, and a sudden medical condition coming out of nowhere that has an impact on life moving forward


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Ken Auguillard on The Oops Factor

Chatting to the AMAZING rockstar that is Ken around our common love of BBQ – find out if he’s a low/slow or high/fast kind of guy. Also touching on a motorbike incident some years back that shaped his approach to life moving forward – some VERY powerful lessons to hear & learn from!


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Hardit Bhatia on The Oops Factor

Talking to the AMAZING Hardit about his love of sports, finding out just WHO his ultimate sports hero is, & discovering a life-changing event that happened as a child, with how it changed his life since…


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Click here to take a look at the other videos that are available to watch.