Module 10 and the capstone of StartCloud's Microsoft 365 Security Essentials learning pathway, in five short units with a knowledge check: why an unmanaged laptop undermines every other control, the four jobs Intune does (enrolment, compliance policies, updates and settings, remote wipe), exactly what an employer can and cannot see on an enrolled device, app protection policies as the lighter option for personal phones, and a four-step rollout that avoids a staff revolt.
Managing Company Devices with Intune
The last gap in the pathway
Have a look at what you have built across this pathway. Sign-in needs a second factor. Admin accounts are separated and protected. Mail is filtered and your domain cannot be spoofed. Sharing is controlled, access is shaped by risk, sensitive data carries its own protection, and there is a real backup behind all of it.
Now picture the laptop it all runs on. Six months behind on updates, no disk encryption, a local account with no passcode, and a browser signed into everything. Every control you have built assumes the device is trustworthy, and until now nothing in the pathway has actually checked.
You cannot tell whether it is encrypted, patched or even still in the building. If it goes missing you have no way to wipe it, and nobody knows what was on the desktop. When someone leaves, you are relying on them to hand it back and on nothing having been copied off it.
Encrypted, patched, and required to prove it before it gets near company data. Lost on the train, and you wipe it from your phone before dinner. The laptop stops being the weak link and starts being another control, which is exactly what Conditional Access back in Module 6 was waiting for.
Module 6 let you say "only allow access from a compliant device." That sentence is doing nothing at all until something is deciding what compliant means and checking it. Intune is that something, and switching it on quietly upgrades several earlier modules at once.