How to Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for Delegated Admins

For any CSP Managed Services Provider, the use of Delegated Admin via Microsoft Partner Center is the life blood for properly providing support to your clients. But what if when accessing a client’s admin center, you receive an error stating “Sign-in failed”.

Clicking “Try again” will send you to your tenants’ admin center instead of the client’s and signing out will just repeat the cycle once more. In many cases opening a service request with Microsoft is the only hope for resolution. Luckily there is a solution to this problem, and it happens to be incredibly easy to implement.

This issue is due to the CSP client enabling Azure Multifactor Authentication on their tenant. As a delegated admin you cannot supersede this access. Meaning, that your work account you use for delegated access must have multi-factor authentication enabled on your tenant.

Steps to Enable MFA

• Log into your companies Office 365 Admin Center.
• Click Users on the left-hand pane and then Active Users.
• Click the More dropdown and select Multifactor Authentication Setup.

• A new tab will open, search for the appropriate user account that requires Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).
• Select the user account and click the Enable button on the right-hand side.

• On the prompt select to Enable Multi-factor Authentication (MFA).

• Please make not of the Application Password and save it in a secure location.

Once Multi-factor Authentication is enabled on your delegated admin account; log back into Microsoft Partner Center and select the Admin Center you were unable to log into before. It should now let you right in with no error prompts.