A single misconfiguration rarely causes a breach. Breaches happen when several things are true at once: a resource is exposed, an identity carries more permission than it needs, a network path is left open, and sensitive data sits one hop away. None of those conditions alone is a crisis. Together, they are a traced route from the internet to your crown jewels.
This is the problem that alert queues cannot solve. No severity score tells you which two medium findings combine into a critical path. To see that, you need a graph — one that maps how every resource, identity, and data store in your Azure and Microsoft 365 environment connects to everything else.
What is an attack path?
An attack path is a traced, hop-by-hop route from an entry point to an impactful target — one that exists right now in your environment because of real configurations, real permissions, and real network reachability.
A typical path looks like this: an AKS workload with a public port open is reachable from the internet. That workload runs under a Managed Identity with Contributor access on a production subscription. Contributor access is enough to read secrets from Key Vault. Three hops. One critical path.
No single alert surfaces this chain. The open port might be flagged as medium. The over-permissioned Managed Identity appears separately. The Key Vault sits in a different queue. None of them communicate the relationship.
Why toxic combinations matter more than isolated findings
Most real incidents are not caused by one catastrophic flaw — they are caused by two or more co-occurring conditions that each look manageable in isolation.
An internet-exposed VM is common and often tolerable depending on what it runs. A Managed Identity with Contributor access is not uncommon — teams frequently assign broad permissions to avoid IAM friction. A Key Vault containing production secrets is expected. Any of these three in isolation is prioritizable.
But when all three coexist on a single path — internet exposure, Contributor-level identity, and secrets at the end — you have a control plane takeover path. The blast radius is not one resource. It is every resource in that subscription.
What changes the severity is not the individual finding — it is the combination and the destination.
The role of the Security Graph
A Security Graph treats every Azure resource, identity, role assignment, network path, and data store as a node with edges — connections that represent real relationships in your environment. When you traverse those edges, you trace paths. When you filter for paths that start at internet exposure and end at crown-jewel data, you get a list of critical attack chains that would never appear in any alert queue.
This is also where blast radius becomes computable rather than estimated. A Security Graph can answer: if an attacker gains access to this entry point, how many nodes can they reach? How many subscriptions can they cross? How many hops to the nearest Key Vault or database? Prioritize by blast radius, and a ten-finding sprint can close thirty attack paths.
Cross-surface paths: when Azure and Microsoft 365 connect
Modern organizations rarely have a clean boundary between Azure infrastructure and Microsoft 365. Identities, OAuth applications, and Azure DevOps pipelines create paths that cross both surfaces. A dormant Microsoft 365 admin account linked to Azure DevOps pipelines can reach production Key Vaults without ever touching a traditionally audited Azure resource.
A Security Graph that extends into Microsoft 365 — treating M365 identities, SharePoint sites, OAuth applications, and Azure resources as nodes in the same graph — surfaces chains that no single-surface tool can see.
What changes when you see the graph
Teams that move from alert queues to a graph-based model report the same shift: instead of triaging a hundred alerts to find the three that matter, the graph surfaces the three and explains why. Instead of estimating blast radius in a post-incident review, it is available before the fix is deployed.
Toxic combinations that were invisible in any single tool become first-class findings. The goal is not more visibility — it is the right visibility, connected, contextualized, and ready to act on.
TENET Security Graph connects Azure and Microsoft 365 identities, workloads, data stores, exposed ports, and findings into one map. See your environment the way an attacker would — and fix what actually matters. Start a free trial or book a demo.