General Manager
A test report says the emergency administrator signed in. The security desk says nobody received the alert. Both statements can be true, and together they tell me the recovery path still needs work.
For a Microsoft Entra emergency access drill, I would ask the identity owner and monitoring team to agree on the evidence they need before the exercise starts. The record below is a worked example for a controlled drill. Use an approved environment and the organisation’s documented emergency access and change procedures.
In this fictional scenario, normal privileged sign-in depends on a federated identity provider that is unavailable. The team tests the approved emergency path under a controlled assumption. It leaves production federation and security controls in place. The exercise lead records the relevant dependency and the evidence that the alternate sign-in path is independent of it. A sign-in test alone does not reproduce the outage.
Before the drill, name the authorised operator, identity owner and monitoring responder. Agree on a time window, the approved workstation and authentication method, a harmless administrative verification in the test tenant, and the conditions for stopping. Keep credential details, recovery material and sensitive account identifiers out of the shared drill record.
| Checkpoint | Evidence observed | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Authorised entry | At 10:02 the designated operator signs in from the approved workstation with the expected method. | Passed for this operator, method and environment. |
| Administrative capability | At 10:03 the operator retrieves the agreed directory role information for a test identity and the observer checks the expected result. | Passed for the scoped read-only task. |
| Monitoring and response | The sign-in event is visible in the log. The agreed five-minute receipt window ends at 10:07 without the designated responder receiving an alert. | Failed the agreed receipt check. Delivery cause remains unknown. |
| Closeout | Operator signs out. The lead preserves the relevant evidence and assigns the monitoring gap to its owner. | Closed with a corrective action and a targeted retest. |
The five-minute window is a fictional acceptance criterion for this case. Set yours with the monitoring team. Agree on when the clock starts, whose receipt counts and how the responder acknowledges it. A dashboard showing an alert rule exists does not establish that the person on duty received and acted on the alert.
The monitoring owner should trace the event through collection, the rule and the notification route. If the evidence stops at the log, the team can record “event observed, receipt unverified” and investigate. Where an agreed receipt check has actually failed, record that result explicitly. Once the owner has corrected the fault through approved change control, repeat the relevant end-to-end path and retain the new evidence beside the original.
I would put the scenario and dependency, scope and approvals, environment, sign-in evidence, task result, alert receipt, responder acknowledgement, closeout owner and retest date on one page. Record each checkpoint as passed, failed or unverified. The pass belongs to the task and conditions actually tested.
Microsoft’s Entra guidance recommends regular validation of authorised access, sign-in and administrative tasks, along with monitoring and alerting. It gives a minimum validation interval of every 90 days for its guidance and identifies changes in IT staff and Entra subscriptions as triggers. Apply your organisation’s approved control and test schedule. If the Saudi National Cybersecurity Authority’s Essential Cybersecurity Controls apply to your organisation, map the exercise evidence to the applicable approved identity and access requirements with the responsible team. This drill covers a narrow recovery path and supplies one part of that evidence.
Take the same approach to a broader service recovery test: define the capability, observe it and retain the evidence. If you are scoping an identity recovery exercise, bring one plausible lockout scenario, the owners of access and monitoring, and the task they need to demonstrate.
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