Microsoft Intune is the most powerful enterprise-level endpoint management solution available right now, but it’s not plug-and-play. Instead, you have to pore through pages of documentation and hundreds of screens to set it up just the way you want it.
For SMEs dealing in sensitive data and MSPs responsible for servicing them, getting your device protection and security policies right is even more challenging.
What kind of device-level security policies should you implement? Does it make sense to enable conditional access? Should you rely on third-party integrations to beef up your security?
Today, we want to help you answer all these questions with a list of standardized best practices and a framework that you can implement right away. Ready? Let’s dive in!
This article covers:
The 4 Elements of Intune Security
Microsoft Intune offers a great deal of customizability when it comes to setting up security and compliance policies for your organization. How you proceed depends on the security goals of your business.
Generally speaking, here are 4 key elements that determine how you approach Intune security at your business:
- Identity and Access Management: Helps ensure that only authorized users and devices can access your organization's resources. IAM involves implementing strong password policies, multi-factor authentication, and conditional access policies to help protect against unauthorized access to sensitive data and resources.
- Endpoint Security: Endpoint security involves securing the endpoints (devices) that connect to your organization's network and resources. This can be achieved by implementing endpoint security measures such as device encryption, password complexity requirements, and screen lock.
- Threat Protection: Helps protect your organization's devices and resources from malware, viruses, and other threats. By configuring Intune's Endpoint Protection capabilities, you can also help protect your company data and devices against threats such as ransomware and phishing attacks.
- Compliance and Governance: Your organization's devices may need to comply with various regulations and standards. This may involve complying with federal regulations like GDPR, or industry-specific laws like HIPAA and FERPA. Intune must be configured properly to ensure that these regulations are met and your data is secure.
Identity and Access Management
Identity and access management (IAM) in Microsoft Intune refers to the set of policies and technologies used to manage user identities and control access to resources in an organization.
With Intune, IT administrators can use Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to manage user identities and apply specific policies to control access to resources such as applications, data, and devices. Here are a series of best practices to keep in mind when setting up identity management with Intune:
- Password Policies and MFA: Passwords are the first line of defense against unauthorized access to sensitive data and resources. By implementing strong password policies in Intune — such as password complexity requirements and periodic expiration policies — you can ensure that passwords are difficult to guess or crack.
Additionally, enabling MFA for all users in Intune can further enhance the security of their accounts by requiring an additional factor, such as a text message, phone call, or authentication app to verify their identity when signing in to their account. This helps protect against password-based attacks such as phishing and brute-force attacks. - Conditional Access Policies (CAP): You can also implement Azure AD conditional access policies to secure access to applications and resources in Microsoft Intune. These policies can be based on factors such as user identity, device health, location, and sign-in risk.
By enabling Azure AD Conditional Access policies in Intune, you can make sure that only authorized users and devices can access your organization's resources, which enhances overall device security.
Endpoint Security
Endpoint security in Microsoft Intune refers to the set of policies and technologies used to protect devices and endpoints in an organization's network.
With Intune endpoint security, IT administrators can apply policies to control and manage devices such as laptops, mobile phones, and tablets. Here are some best practices to keep in mind when setting up endpoint security for your organization:
- Mobile Device Management (MDM): Intune Mobile Device Management (MDM) allows IT administrators to configure device-level security policies, such as device encryption, password complexity, and screen lock. By configuring these policies, organizations can help ensure that devices accessing their corporate data are secure and meet the organization's security requirements.
- Mobile Application Management (MAM): Mobile Application Management (MAM) policies help protect business data on personal devices by applying app-level data protection, app management, and app protection policies.
These policies can ensure that corporate data is protected on personal devices, even if the device itself is not under company control.
Threat Protection
By implementing threat protection for Microsoft Intune, organizations can help ensure that their devices and data remain protected against cyber threats and malware attacks. Moreover, regular monitoring and analysis of security logs and events can help detect and respond to security incidents quickly and efficiently.
Here are a few best practices to consider when configuring Intune for threat protection:
- Built-in Endpoint Protection: Intune’s native endpoint protection capabilities include malware and virus protection, firewall configuration, and device health monitoring. By deploying these capabilities, IT administrators can help protect mobile devices from cyber threats and malware attacks.
- Security Logs and Event Monitoring: IT administrators should regularly monitor Intune logs and events to detect any suspicious activity that could indicate a security breach.
Integrating Intune with Azure Sentinel can provide advanced threat intelligence and security analytics, making it easier to identify and respond to security incidents. - Microsoft Defender for Endpoint: Microsoft Defender for Endpoint provides advanced threat protection capabilities, including endpoint detection and response, threat and vulnerability management, and automated investigation and response.
By integrating Intune with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, IT administrators can help detect and respond to security threats in real time, reducing the risk of a successful cyber attack.
Compliance and Governance
By aligning policies with data regulations, monitoring compliance, using reporting capabilities, and more, organizations can reduce the risk of non-compliance and protect sensitive data across the board. Here are a few best practices for getting started:
- Data Regulation Policy Implementation: As an IT leader, you must familiarize yourself with the regulatory requirements set forth by federal and state-level data protection laws like GDPR and CCPA. Make sure that your organization’s data structure and security measures are on par with the regulations imposed by the laws of the land by implementing proper device and application-level security measures with Microsoft Intune.
- Ensuring Compliance with Ongoing Reports: Intune comes with state-of-the-art report generation capabilities to help you keep track of your organization’s compliance posture on an ongoing basis. You can take advantage of a variety of device and app compliance reports, as well as policy-specific compliance evaluations. Learn more about them on the Microsoft website.
Automate Your Microsoft Intune Compliance Posture With CoreView
Need help managing your organization’s compliance posture with Microsoft Intune?
CoreView Configuration Manager is a premium end-to-end configuration management solution for Microsoft 365. It helps you automate security, compliance, and lifecycle management across multiple tenants for a series of apps and services from Microsoft, including Intune.
At CoreView, we have spent years perfecting a security baseline that can help ensure maximum compliance under most regulatory scenarios for Microsoft 365 and Intune. With our web-based no-code application portal, you can deploy security baselines and monitor ongoing drift using a single unified dashboard.
Want to learn more about how CoreView Configuration Manager can help you ensure compliance with Microsoft Intune? Request a free demo today!
