Glossary
Microsoft Intune
Microsoft Intune is Microsoft's cloud MDM and UEM service, used to enroll, configure and secure Windows PCs, phones and tablets from the Microsoft 365 admin experience. It is sold inside Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 plans and sits at the center of Microsoft's device management stack.
How it works
Intune runs as a service in your Microsoft tenant and leans on Entra ID for identity. A device enrolls (through Windows Autopilot on a new PC, or through Apple and Android enrollment programs on mobile), and from then on it checks in, receives configuration profiles, applications and compliance rules, and reports its state back. Compliance results feed Conditional Access, which is the part most teams actually buy it for: a non-compliant laptop loses access to Exchange and SharePoint without an admin lifting a finger.
The product changed names more than once. It was Windows Intune in 2011, then part of Enterprise Mobility + Security, and since 2022 it sits under the Microsoft Intune brand alongside Endpoint Analytics and Configuration Manager integration. Expect older documentation to use old names.
Why it matters for a fleet
If your organization already lives in Microsoft 365, Intune is the obvious candidate. The licensing is often already paid for, the identity is the same, and the link between device compliance and access to Office data is tighter than any third party can build.
The honest counterweight is complexity. Intune is administered across several portals, policy types overlap (configuration profiles, settings catalog, security baselines, old ADMX templates), and a mobile-only fleet pays for a lot of Windows machinery it will never use. Teams without a dedicated Microsoft specialist often spend weeks on a setup a simpler tool handles in days. Data residency is a second question worth asking, since European public sector and regulated companies have their own constraints.
How Appaloosa handles it
Appaloosa competes with Intune, and the choice depends on your fleet. For multi-OS mobile estates (iOS, Android and Windows PCs) where enrollment, app distribution and BitLocker enforcement matter more than deep Office integration, Appaloosa is faster to set up, easier to hand to a non-specialist, and hosted in France on SecNumCloud-qualified infrastructure. Where Intune wins is inside the Microsoft ecosystem. Some organizations run both: Intune on desktops, Appaloosa on field devices. The supported Windows policies are listed on the Windows MDM page.
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