Where is the membership of security groups stored in SharePoint Online?

Question

I have a security group in Azure AD that I use for permissions on multiple SharePoint sites. It takes a few hours for edits made to the security group to sync to SharePoint, so I know SharePoint doesn't manually pull the membership from Azure AD. Where is the membership of security groups stored in SharePoint Online?

Answer 1

If you're using an AAD security group, changes should be instant -- though I would look at Azure Access Packages instead.

SharePoint stores the external tokens in the SharePoint content database which you do not have access to.

Answer 2

These are stored in the content database, but you are using SharePoint online.

The content database is managed by Microsoft and we cannot access it.

If the business is urgent and needs to refresh it immediately, you can open a service request and contact a Microsoft engineer to help you manually refresh.