Question

A financial services company is designing a new customer-facing microservices platform on Azure. The security architect wants to ensure the design embodies the three foundational Zero Trust guiding principles as defined in the Microsoft Cybersecurity Reference Architectures. Which combination of design decisions BEST reflects all three core Zero Trust principles (verify explicitly, use least-privilege access, assume breach)?

Accepted Answer

Authenticate and authorize every request using all available signals, grant just-in-time and just-enough-access with risk-based adaptive policies, and segment access while encrypting end-to-end and using analytics for threat detection.

Answer

Place all microservices behind a single perimeter firewall, grant standing administrative roles to the operations team, and rely on annual penetration testing to validate the security posture.

Answer

Trust all traffic originating from within the corporate network, use shared service accounts across microservices for simplicity, and enable diagnostic logging only for production workloads.

Answer

Require MFA at initial sign-in only, assign broad Contributor roles to developers for faster delivery, and centralize all telemetry into a single unmonitored storage account.