Setting up an SC-300 lab on a free Microsoft 365 E5 dev tenant

The SC-300 exam covers identity governance at an enterprise scale, but you don't need an enterprise budget to study for it. Microsoft offers a free E5 developer tenant that gives you access to nearly everything you need.

Getting the developer tenant

Head to the Microsoft 365 Developer Program and sign up. You'll get a 90-day renewable E5 subscription with 25 user licenses. This is enough to simulate real identity scenarios.

First steps

Once your tenant is provisioned, the first thing I do is create a handful of test users with different roles. This gives you the foundation for conditional access policies, access reviews, and entitlement management.

What's next

In the next post, I'll walk through setting up your first conditional access policy without locking yourself out of the tenant.