The security of our customer data is controlled by security roles in Dynamics 365 CE. Security roles are nothing but a combination of different privileges and access levels. Dynamics 365 CE contains many out-of-the-box security roles. Roles can be customized based on our specific requirements, or we can create a new security role if required. It is recommended that you copy an existing security role that matches most with your requirement, and then modify it. Security roles are mainly configured to match different job profiles in any organization—such as a salesperson, sales manager, customer executive, application administrator, and customizer— for roles that make metadata changes in an application.

Dynamics 365 CE allows us to configure different security roles based on user profiles. We can assign these security roles to users so that they can only access data that is required by them. We can assign single or multiple security roles to any user, but every Dynamics 365 CE user should be associated with at least one security role.

We can assign a security role to a single user, or we can add a user to a team and assign a security role to teams. Security roles are managed based on business units. All child business units inherit security roles that are available in the root business unit automatically. So, when creating security roles, keep in mind that it is best to create security roles in the root business unit because we can only include security roles in the solution that is created in the root business unit. Any security role created in the child business unit can't be added to the solution. So, if you want to move your security roles to another environment, create them under the root business unit. In the following screenshot, we can see different privileges and access levels that we can configure for an entity list:

We need to configure both privileges and access levels for entities. We can see different entities that are divided into multiple tabs such as Core Records, Marketing, Sales, and Service based on their functionality.

Now that we have an idea about how security roles work, let's discuss privileges and access levels.