Exploring Microsoft Intune: What it is and how to use it

Businesses now run on a wider variety of devices than ever, company laptops, personal phones, tablets used for remote work, and each one represents a potential route into corporate data. Microsoft Intune is Microsoft’s answer to that management problem: a cloud-based platform that gives IT teams centralised control over every device accessing the organisation’s systems, without requiring on-premises infrastructure.

What Intune actually does

At its core, Intune simplifies the management of every device used to access company data. That spans company-issued laptops and phones, but also personal devices under a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy.

Microsoft Intune works through two complementary mechanisms:

Mobile Device Management (MDM) enrolls the device itself into Intune. This gives your IT team control over the full device, enforcing OS update policies, enabling BitLocker encryption, running remote wipes if the device is lost or stolen, and verifying that the device meets your compliance requirements before granting access.

Mobile Application Management (MAM) controls corporate applications on a device without enrolling the device itself. This matters for BYOD: you can enforce policies on the Microsoft 365 apps on an employee’s personal phone, prevent copy-paste from Outlook to personal apps, enforce PIN access, wipe corporate app data, while leaving their personal apps and content untouched.

The key features and what they mean in practice

Why businesses use Intune: three real scenarios

BYOD environments. When employees use personal phones to access work email and Teams, you have no visibility by default. Intune’s MAM capabilities let you protect corporate data, enforce data-at-rest encryption for app data, prevent forwarding company email to personal accounts, block screenshots, without requiring full device enrolment or touching personal content.

Remote workforce management. Before cloud-based MDM, IT teams needed physical access to troubleshoot and configure devices. Intune gives admins a single console to remotely push updates, run diagnostics, rotate BitLocker recovery keys, and wipe devices, regardless of where the device is located.

Simplified app deployment. Rolling out a new application to 50 devices used to mean manual visits or complex deployment scripts. With Intune, you create an app policy, assign it to a group of users, and the app installs automatically the next time each device checks in. Updates deploy the same way.

Getting started with Intune

Getting Intune running involves three sequential stages, though how much work is involved depends heavily on your current Microsoft 365 configuration and device landscape.

Licencing. Intune is included in Microsoft 365 Business Premium, Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) E3 and E5, and Microsoft 365 E3 and E5. If you’re on Business Standard or Basic, you’ll need to upgrade or add Intune as a standalone licence.

Device enrolment. This is the phase that requires the most planning. For Windows devices, Windows Autopilot is the most efficient path, new devices arrive pre-configured, existing devices can be reset and enrolled. For iOS and Android, employees use the Company Portal app. For macOS, enrolment happens through the same portal.

Policy configuration. After enrolment, you configure compliance policies, configuration profiles, app protection policies, and conditional access rules. This is where the security value is realised, but it also requires understanding your organisation’s device landscape, security requirements, and what you’re trying to protect.

The most common failure mode in Intune deployments is over-complexity, organisations try to configure every policy at once and end up blocking their own users. A phased approach, starting with compliance baselines and working toward conditional access, avoids that.