What Is Microsoft Intune and How Does It Help IT Teams?

When a company has five employees, device management means handing someone a laptop and showing them how to connect to Wi-Fi. When it has 30 employees across two offices and a handful of remote workers — some on company devices, some on personal phones — that approach stops working. Devices get lost, employees leave without returning hardware, someone's personal phone has company email on it with no PIN set. Microsoft Intune is how IT teams manage that complexity without a truck roll to every desk.

What Intune Actually Does

Intune is a Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile Application Management (MAM) platform. Those two functions are distinct and both matter.

MDM means managing the entire device. When a Windows laptop or iPhone is enrolled in Intune MDM, IT can push configuration profiles, enforce security policies, deploy applications, and remotely wipe the device if it's lost or stolen. The user doesn't need to call IT to get software installed — it appears automatically. Compliance policies can check whether disk encryption is enabled, whether the OS is up to date, whether a PIN or password is set — and flag or block devices that don't meet the standard.

MAM means managing applications without controlling the whole device. This matters for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) scenarios. An employee who uses their personal iPhone for work email doesn't necessarily want their employer to be able to wipe their entire phone. With MAM, Intune can protect and manage corporate data within specific apps — Outlook, Teams, OneDrive — without touching personal photos, messages, or other apps. Corporate data stays in a managed container. If the employee leaves, IT can wipe the corporate data from the apps without affecting the personal device.

What Intune Replaced (and Didn't)

The legacy Microsoft device management tool is System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), now rebranded as Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager. SCCM is a powerful on-premise tool that's been the backbone of enterprise Windows management for 20+ years. It requires servers on-site, significant infrastructure investment, and specialized expertise to operate.

Intune is cloud-native. There's no on-premise server to maintain. Management consoles live in the Intune portal (intune.microsoft.com), devices enroll via Azure AD, and policies are pushed over the internet. For SMBs that don't have the IT staff or infrastructure to run SCCM properly, Intune is not just a replacement — it's a meaningful upgrade in approachability.

For larger enterprises with existing SCCM deployments, Microsoft offers co-management — Intune and SCCM can run together, with workloads migrated to the cloud incrementally. Most SMBs starting fresh should go Intune-only.

Licensing

Intune is included in Microsoft 365 Business Premium at $22/user/month (USD). It's also available as a standalone add-on for about $8/user/month, or included in the Enterprise Mobility + Security E3 bundle.

For most SMBs already in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, the business case for Microsoft 365 Business Premium over Business Standard pays for itself largely through Intune. The alternative — manually visiting each device to configure security settings, with no remote wipe capability and no enforcement mechanism — has its own cost in IT labor and breach risk.

Real Use Cases

Enforce disk encryption automatically. Windows BitLocker and macOS FileVault can be enabled via Intune policy and the recovery key stored in Azure AD. No more "did we remember to turn on encryption before we handed this laptop to the new hire?"

Remote wipe a lost device. An employee loses a company laptop at the airport. From the Intune console, IT can issue a remote wipe in minutes. For personal devices with MAM, IT can selectively wipe only corporate app data without touching personal content.

Push software without touching the device. Line-of-business apps, Microsoft 365 applications, Chrome, VPN clients — all can be deployed from the Intune console to enrolled devices silently in the background. New employee gets a laptop, turns it on, and everything they need is already there.

Conditional access. Combined with Azure AD conditional access policies, Intune enables a rule like: "You can only access corporate email and SharePoint from a device that is enrolled in Intune and meets compliance requirements." A personal laptop without Intune enrollment gets a login page that tells the user they need to enroll before they can access company data. This closes one of the most common attack vectors — credential theft from an unmanaged device.

BYOD policies. With MAM, employees can enroll their personal devices to access work email and Teams without full MDM enrollment. Corporate data in managed apps is protected. IT has visibility into which personal devices are accessing company data. Employees retain privacy on their personal side.

When Intune Makes Sense

Intune starts delivering clear value around 20 employees. Below that threshold, the setup investment relative to the fleet size is harder to justify. Above it — especially if you have remote workers, employees using personal devices for work email, or turnover that requires regular device provisioning — the time savings and security improvement are significant.

Industries where device compliance matters for security audits (professional services, healthcare, financial services) benefit even at smaller employee counts, because Intune gives you a documented record of device compliance that you can reference in vendor questionnaires or audit conversations.

The biggest misconception about Intune is that it's an enterprise tool that's too complex for a 40-person company. The admin experience has improved substantially in the past three years, and a properly set up Intune environment for an SMB can be managed in a few hours per month rather than requiring dedicated headcount. The initial deployment is where the work is — getting devices enrolled, policies configured, and conditional access rules defined. Once that's done, it largely runs itself.