Enhancing Microsoft Intune With Digital Experience Monitoring

Exoprise embraces and extends Microsoft Intune

Organizations today rely on mobile device management (MDM) solutions to secure and manage corporate resources across a diverse range of devices. One such platform is Microsoft Intune, which offers security, patch, and access control features for mobile and desktop devices. Today, we look at Microsoft Intune and how Exoprise Service Watch helps customers ensure Intune is working well. The combination of Exoprise and Microsoft Intune keeps it running well and makes sure it doesn’t affect the employee digital experience.

What Is Microsoft Intune?

Microsoft Intune is a cloud-based solution for managing and securing enterprise devices, apps, and data. It seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365 services, making it easier to manage various aspects like groups, policies, and access controls. Properly using Intune is important for keeping devices compliant with security policies, business applications, and identifying potential security risks. For example, Microsoft Intune is critical for managing group policy, access control, Windows Updates, and Microsoft Defender.

Microsoft Intune also has lightweight monitoring and reporting capabilities which can track device reliability, startup performance, system and application reliability. Mostly, though, its reporting relates to compliance and security. Intune does not have any reporting or monitoring related to networked applications or the overall experience of SaaS applications, Unified Communications, UCaaS apps or dependencies.

Device Management in Microsoft Intune

Microsoft Intune is essential to ensure that all business associated devices remain in compliance with the organization’s security policies, identify potential vulnerabilities, or uncover security breaches. By implementing a robust device MDM and MAM strategy, businesses safeguard their networks and resources against potential threats.

Benefits of Using Intune with Endpoint Management

1. Establishing Policies:

  • Creation and configuration of device compliance policies based on organizational requirements.
  • Utilization of Intune’s rich set of predefined compliance policies, or create custom policies tailored to business-specific needs.
  • Definitions of policies related to password complexity, device encryption, application installation, and more.

2. Active Directory Integration:

  • Seamless integration of Microsoft Intune with your existing Active Directory infrastructure.
  • Leverage of Intune’s Group Policy Objects (GPO’s) to enforce security policies and access controls across managed devices.

3. Real-time Monitoring:

  • Utilization of Intune’s device security monitoring capabilities to track device compliance.
  • Monitor device connection status, app deployments, security updates, and potential security incidents through the Intune console.

4. Application Deployment and Management:

Advanced Policy Management Techniques

To strengthen MDM and MAM policies further, organizations can implement several advanced techniques that harness the power of Microsoft Intune. These methods offer a deeper level of inspection and customization, enhancing overall security and control, which include:

1. Conditional Access Policies:

  • Implementation of conditional access policies to restrict access based on specific criteria, such as geographical location, device compliance status, or user roles.
  • Enforcement of multifactor authentication for devices attempting to connect to corporate resources.

2. Azure Active Directory (now Microsoft Entra ID) Identity Protection:

  • Integration of Microsoft Intune with Azure Active Directory (now Microsoft Entra ID) Identity Protection to identify and respond to potential security risks.
  • Utilization of risk-based conditional access policies to monitor the health of user authentications and block suspicious access attempts.

3. Intune Data Warehouse and Power BI (Business Intelligence) Integration:

  • Leverage the Intune Data Warehouse and Power BI integration to create custom reports and dashboards.
  • Gain valuable insights into device connection trends, compliance status, and security incidents.

4. Integration with Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS):

  • Combine the power of Intune with MCAS to monitor and control cloud application usage in your organization seamlessly.
  • Identify risky application behaviors and take necessary actions through Intune’s console.

Best Practices for Tracking Device Compliance

While Microsoft Intune provides a comprehensive set of tools to track device policy compliance, it is essential to follow certain best practices to derive maximum value from these functionalities:

  • Regularly update and review device compliance policies to align with evolving security requirements.
  • Establish a clear incident response plan to address potential security breaches promptly.
  • Regularly evaluate device connection logs and security reports to identify anomalies and address them proactively.
  • Conduct periodic audits of device connection policies, user roles, and access controls to ensure ongoing compliance and security.
  • Continuously train employees about safe device use practices and reinforce the importance of compliance with security policies.

Exoprise Enhances and Extends Microsoft Intune

Combining Intune’s compliance capabilities with Exoprise’s device monitoring helps an organization’s overall security and compliance. Monitoring the network digital experience makes sure that employees aren’t frustrated with Microsoft Intune, so they stay more compliant:

  • Exoprise monitors the connectivity between the Intune client processes and the Microsoft cloud to Intune’s services for measuring reliability and Intune response times.
  • Since Intune doesn’t do any network, ISP, or Internet performance scoring, Exoprise integrates network performance scoring with Intune data collection.
  • Service Watch can utilize Intune Device Groups for aggregating and graphing network and system performance by device group. This can be helpful in analyzing device performance and application reliability.
  • Microsoft Intune processes and services are monitored by Service Watch for overhead and performance problems. The set of Intune processes are included as part of the core applications and tracked for latency, overhead, response time and networking.
  • Customers utilize CloudReady synthetic sensors, namely Web Login and WGET sensors, to monitor the services of Microsoft Intune. This ensures the health and availability of the Intune service.
    • Web Login sensors are utilized for the Intune portal
    • Web get synthetic tests are specifically monitored for the following Intune sub-services:
  • Finally, we integrate our real-time network diagnostics via Service Watch Browser and Service Watch Desktop to capture the overall performance of Intune
    • By monitoring core apps such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom and more, for network latency, jitter, and packet-loss.
    • Offering real-time, always-connected network diagnostics alongside Microsoft Intune

Exoprise at Work With Intune

Monitoring device security and patching using Microsoft Intune enables organizations to proactively identify and address risks. This safeguards corporate resources from potential security breaches and vulnerabilities.

Exoprise’s Service Watch and CloudReady solutions are used for continuous monitoring of Microsoft Intune and to ensure there is no impact to business outcomes or operations.

Brad Saville is the Director of Customer Success and aims to help customers get the most out of their Exoprise environment.

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