Keeping your organization’s devices secure and under control can be a complex task. Microsoft Intune, a cloud-based service, simplifies endpoint management by providing a central hub to manage various devices, including laptops, tablets, mobiles, wearables, and more.
What are the benefits of using Microsoft Intune?
- Unified management: Intune offers a single platform to manage devices, including organization-owned and personally owned devices (BYOD) accessing your organization’s resources.
- Enhanced security: Enforce security policies to protect your data across all devices. Intune integrates with Microsoft Entra ID and Mobile Threat Defense (MTD) partners for additional protection.
- Compliance monitoring: Set and enforce compliance rules to ensure devices meet your organization’s security standards.
- Remote management: Intune allows you to remotely lock, wipe, locate, or restart devices.
How to get started with Microsoft Intune
- Enroll devices: To manage devices with Intune, either enroll personal devices for full policy deployment and configuration or use app protection policies to secure app-specific data without full device enrollment.
- Manage existing devices: Intune supports various platforms, including Android, iOS/iPadOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. For existing devices managed by another service, a factory reset might be necessary.
- Set compliance policies: Define compliance rules like password complexity, firewall requirements, and minimum OS version. Intune’s built-in reporting helps identify non-compliant devices. Conditional Access, a feature of Microsoft Entra, enforces these policies by restricting access to organizational resources for non-compliant devices.
- Control device features: Intune allows you to manage features like camera access, Bluetooth pairing, and power button functions through policies assigned to device groups. These groups can be categorized by OS, function, location, or other criteria.
- Secure your devices: Integrate with MTD partners for vulnerability scanning and remediation. Utilize security baselines for preconfigured security settings on Windows devices. Intune also allows management of software updates, hard disk encryption, and firewalls. For automatic patching, consider Windows Autopatch.
- Remote device management: The Intune admin center allows remote actions such as locking, restarting, locating, or wiping a lost or stolen device.
Additional resources
- Microsoft Intune documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/
- Microsoft Intune planning guide: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/
- Deployment guide: Setup or move to Microsoft Intune: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/
Conclusion
In conclusion, Microsoft Intune offers a streamlined, cloud-based solution for managing an organization’s devices. It provides unified management, enhanced security, compliance monitoring, and robust remote capabilities across various devices and operating systems. By enrolling devices, setting compliance policies, controlling features, and integrating with Mobile Threat Defense partners, Intune simplifies endpoint management. Additional resources assist in planning and deployment, helping organizations maintain control, bolster security, and ensure compliance, ultimately easing the complexities of device management.
