Licensing conversations in Microsoft environments are uncomfortable because they’re usually happening at the wrong time – after someone has already designed a deployment around capabilities that turn out to require a higher license tier than the organization has. This article…
Conditional Access enforcement is covered in Phase 8. But several decisions that determine whether Conditional Access works correctly belong in Phase 2 – before devices enroll, before policies are deployed, and before anyone touches the Conditional Access blade. This article…
Understanding how Intune actually processes and evaluates configuration profiles changes how you design them. Not just conceptually – it changes specific decisions about how many profiles to create, how to structure assignments, and how to troubleshoot when something doesn’t apply…
Intune supports multiple application packaging models and the choice between them is consequential. Not because one is universally better, but because each model makes different assumptions about installer behavior, detection capability, and deployment reliability – and choosing wrong produces failures…
The most common compliance policy failure I see isn’t misconfiguration – it’s compliance theater. Rules that look thorough on paper but don’t actually reflect meaningful trust requirements. Environments where the compliance dashboard is green, but the signal feeding Conditional Access…
Compliance policies occupy an unusual position in the Intune architecture. They don’t configure anything. They don’t enforce anything. What they do is measure device state against defined requirements and produce a signal – compliant or non-compliant – that everything else…
Patch management has a reputation for being a maintenance task. In a cloud-managed environment it’s a security control – and the distinction matters for how you design it. Devices that aren’t current aren’t just inconvenient. They’re non-compliant, and non-compliant devices…
Defender for Endpoint is not just an antivirus product. It’s a threat detection and response platform that, when properly connected to Intune, changes how device trust signals flow through your entire environment. Most environments have Defender running on their devices.…
