Assign a managed identity access to a resource using PowerShell

Managed identities for Azure resources is a feature of Microsoft Entra ID. Each of the Azure services that support managed identities for Azure resources are subject to their own timeline. Make sure you review the availability status of managed identities for your resource and known issues before you begin.

Once you've configured an Azure resource with a managed identity, you can give the managed identity access to another resource, just like any security principal. This example shows you how to give an Azure virtual machine's managed identity access to an Azure storage account using PowerShell.

Note

We recommend that you use the Azure Az PowerShell module to interact with Azure. See Install Azure PowerShell to get started. To learn how to migrate to the Az PowerShell module, see Migrate Azure PowerShell from AzureRM to Az.

Prerequisites

Use Azure RBAC to assign a managed identity access to another resource

  1. Enable managed identity on an Azure resource, such as an Azure VM.

  2. In this example, we are giving an Azure VM access to a storage account. First we use Get-AzVM to get the service principal for the VM named myVM, which was created when we enabled managed identity. Then, use New-AzRoleAssignment to give the VM Reader access to a storage account called myStorageAcct:

    $spID = (Get-AzVM -ResourceGroupName myRG -Name myVM).identity.principalid
    New-AzRoleAssignment -ObjectId $spID -RoleDefinitionName "Reader" -Scope "/subscriptions/<mySubscriptionID>/resourceGroups/<myResourceGroup>/providers/Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/<myStorageAcct>"
    

Next steps