Since the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of computers, logging into our computer resources has been all about username and password. The username and password model has worked pretty well considering the simplicity of this model, but now it’s time to move on to better thought out authentication and authorization systems.

In this blog post I’m going to look at the current state of Conditional Access in Azure and Office 365. We’ll look at what Conditional Access is, how it works, and some of the other authentication and authorization systems interact with Conditional Access. In this blog post, I’m not so much going for a technical explanation of what buttons to click to make this or that feature work so much as a higher-level discussion of the reasons and theories behind Conditional Access.