M365Clarity · Admin Accounts
Global Administrator accounts in Microsoft 365 have unrestricted access to everything in your tenant — email, files, user accounts, security settings, billing. If a global admin account is compromised, an attacker can disable MFA, create new accounts, exfiltrate data, and lock out legitimate administrators. Limiting the number of permanent global admins is one of the most impactful things you can do.
The Admin Accounts tab scans your tenant and surfaces every account with a privileged role — Global Administrator, Security Administrator, Exchange Administrator, SharePoint Administrator, and others. It shows you how many privileged accounts exist, which ones are cloud-only versus synced from on-premises Active Directory, and whether any have permanent role assignments that could be replaced with time-limited PIM (Privileged Identity Management) activation.
Microsoft recommends between 2 and 4 Global Administrator accounts per tenant — enough for redundancy without unnecessary exposure. Accounts above this threshold are flagged for review.
M365Clarity also highlights whether emergency access (break-glass) accounts are present. These are accounts deliberately excluded from Conditional Access policies that exist solely to recover access if normal admin accounts are locked out. Microsoft recommends having at least one, and it should be monitored closely for any sign-in activity.
The right approach is to use least-privilege roles where possible (give SharePoint admins SharePoint Administrator, not Global Administrator), implement Privileged Identity Management so elevated access is time-limited, and regularly review role assignments to remove accounts that no longer need them. M365Clarity gives you the visibility to make that review systematic rather than a manual one-off.
M365Clarity scans your Microsoft 365 configuration and shows you exactly what's in your plan, what's configured, and what's sitting idle — in plain English.
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