Intune Archives - EasySAM https://easysam.co.uk/tag/intune/ Software Asset Management. Simplified. Thu, 30 Apr 2026 12:19:33 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 https://easysam.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/easysam_icon-60x60.png Intune Archives - EasySAM https://easysam.co.uk/tag/intune/ 32 32 How to address hidden costs in Microsoft Intune’s pricing model https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/how-to-address-hidden-costs-in-microsoft-intunes-pricing-model/ Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:49:43 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=37402 With a complex licensing structure that often catches people off guard, here’s a look at where those surprise costs come from and how to get ahead before they hit your budget.

The post How to address hidden costs in Microsoft Intune’s pricing model appeared first on EasySAM.

]]>
Search Mobile-alt Envelope Linkedin Bell

Intune

Search Mobile-alt Envelope Bell

Find out more below

Intune

With a complex licensing structure that often catches people off guard, here’s a look at where those surprise costs come from and how to get ahead before they hit your budget.

Published on 29th April 2026

Managing endpoint security for a remote team is one of the trickier problems in IT right now. With so many organisations now running fully remote operations, security teams are managing fleets of personal devices spread across home offices, public networks and sometimes even spanning continents.

For these people to be able to work effectively, all of these devices need to be connected to the same sensitive systems, leading many cybersecurity teams to prioritise the risks associated with these connections.

Today, about 26% of organisations now run on a fully remote model, according to Gallup. Each one of these workplaces carries a unique endpoint security challenge. Microsoft Intune has emerged as a popular fix for this, offering centralised control over devices, apps, and access policies from one console.

However, there’s another side to the picture. Intune’s licensing structure is layered in ways that often catch organisations off guard, usually after they have already committed. So here’s a clear look at where those surprise costs come from and how to get ahead of them before they hit your budget.

Licensing Complexity

If you have ever gone down the rabbit hole of information on Microsoft Intune pricing, you know how quickly the options multiply. There are Standalone plans, Microsoft 365 bundles, and Enterprise Mobility and Security suites, each one promising slightly different things at slightly different price points.

Organisations often default to higher-tier plans, thinking they need everything, only to find that a large chunk of their workforce uses a fraction of those features.

The variety sounds helpful until you are actually trying to decide, and then it just gets confusing fast. The bigger problem is what happens after organisations commit to a Microsoft Intune licensing plan. Frontline workers rarely need the same access tier as developers or finance teams, yet all groups often end up on identical plans.

How to address licensing complexity with your Intune use:

  • Map licenses to user personas: frontline employees and power users have very different needs, so matching license tiers to actual roles saves meaningful money without sacrificing coverage
  • Audit and reclaim unused seats regularly: with research from Nexthink indicating that about half of software licenses across large organisations go completely unused, a quarterly license review is worth building into your routine. Inactive accounts sitting on paid plans are easy to miss and expensive to ignore, so spotting and reassigning them before the next billing cycle keeps your budget from leaking in the background
  • Choose bundles only when feature usage justifies the cost: bundled plans look economical on paper, but only when your teams are actively using the included features across the board

Add-Ons and Feature Gaps

Intune’s base plan is solid, but several features that security teams genuinely rely on sit behind separate paywalls. Remote Help, Endpoint Privilege Management, and Advanced Analytics are three good examples of tools that feel essential in a remote-heavy environment, but these require additional spend on top of your existing subscription.

The issue isn’t a single add-on. Each one looks reasonable in isolation. The problem shows up when you start stacking them, because those incremental costs accumulate into a monthly number that nobody budgeted for at the start.

Security teams often discover this mid-deployment, when pulling back on already-promised features feels harder than just absorbing the extra cost. Getting ahead of that situation starts with a cleaner evaluation process before commitments are made.

How to address add-ons and feature gaps with your Intune use:

  • Compare add-on costs against the full Intune Suite price: sometimes the Suite works out cheaper than buying individual add-ons separately, so run the numbers before committing either way
  • Separate must-have features from nice-to-have ones: not every advanced feature earns its place in your stack, so prioritise what your team will use daily over what looks impressive in a pitch deck
  • Standardise feature usage across teams: when different departments use overlapping tools inconsistently, cost fragments and visibility drops, so a unified approach keeps spending predictable

Infrastructure and Integration Costs

The Intune subscription fee is only part of the picture. Running Intune at scale often incurs a set of Azure-related costs that are not always factored into the initial budget conversation.

Storage for device logs, networking bandwidth, and diagnostic data retention all contribute to a bill that grows quietly alongside your deployment. For organisations managing hybrid environments, where Intune runs alongside Configuration Manager in a co-management setup, the complexity multiplies further.

Maintaining two systems that need to talk to each other cleanly takes engineering time, and engineering time costs money. Integration overhead with existing HR systems, identity providers, or third-party security tools adds another layer. The problem is, these expenses tend to get underestimated because they live outside the core Intune pricing conversation.

How to address infrastructure and integrations with your Intune use:

  • Design your cloud architecture with cost controls from day one: decisions around log retention periods, storage tiers, and data routing have a direct impact on your monthly Azure spend
  • Audit data storage and logging levels regularly: keeping verbose logs stored for too long leads to unnecessary storage costs. So trim retention settings to what you actually need
  • Simplify integrations wherever the architecture allows: every additional system Intune talks to adds maintenance overhead, so consolidating where possible keeps both costs and complexity manageable

Deployment and Operational Overhead

Getting Intune up and running is not a flip-the-switch situation. Setup involves configuring enrolment profiles, building compliance policies, and migrating existing endpoints, and that takes real time and real people.

Once deployment is done, the operational load does not disappear either. Policy management, troubleshooting failures, and supporting remote employees on personal devices keep IT teams consistently busy.

The hidden cost here gets absorbed into your team’s capacity, and that is worth accounting for before deployment begins.

How to address overhead with your Intune use:

  • Automate device enrollment and policy enforcement: automated enrollment through Windows Autopilot or Apple Business Manager removes a significant chunk of manual IT workload from the start
  • Use standardised configurations and templates: building reusable policy templates across device types keeps management consistent and reduces time spent troubleshooting one-off configurations
  • Invest in training early: upskilling your IT team before full deployment reduces the trial-and-error phase considerably and prevents inefficiencies from compounding over time

Feature Overlap and Tool Sprawl

Many organisations arrive at Intune already carrying a stack of tools accumulated over the years. The uncomfortable truth is that Microsoft 365 licenses already include capabilities that overlap with several of these third-party tools.

Many teams pay separately for mobile device management, app protection, and identity-based access controls.

Those same features often come bundled inside licenses they already own. This redundancy can inflate your total security spend without adding meaningful coverage.

How to address tool sprawl and redundancies with your Intune use:

  • Run a tool rationalisation audit: map every security and endpoint tool your organisation currently pays for against what your Microsoft 365 license already covers to find the overlaps
  • Retire redundant third-party tools: once overlaps are confirmed, phase out tools that duplicate native Microsoft capabilities and redirect that budget toward gaps that genuinely need filling
  • Maximise native Microsoft features first: before evaluating any new tool, check whether Intune or an adjacent Microsoft service already does the job well enough for your use case

The Bill Does Not Have to Surprise You

No platform is perfect out of the box, and Intune is no exception. But the organizations that struggle most with its costs are usually the ones that set it up once and never look back. Intune has the depth to handle complex, distributed environments well. A few hours of license review each quarter, honest conversations about which add-ons are earning their keep, and a cleaner integration approach make a real difference to your Intune implementation. Pair this with some financial discipline, and you end up with a security setup that is both effective and sustainable.

Source

https://www.technology.org/2026/04/29/how-to-address-hidden-costs-in-microsoft-intunes-pricing-model/

Image Credit

Olha Myronova via Vecteezy

The post How to address hidden costs in Microsoft Intune’s pricing model appeared first on EasySAM.

]]> Introducing the Microsoft Intune product family https://easysam.co.uk/news/introducing-the-microsoft-intune-product-family/ Wed, 12 Oct 2022 10:00:00 +0000 https://wptest.easysam.co.uk/?p=24857 Today, Microsoft Intune grows into a product family for all things endpoint management at Microsoft.

The post Introducing the Microsoft Intune product family appeared first on EasySAM.

]]>
Search Mobile-alt Envelope Linkedin Bell

Intune

Search Mobile-alt Envelope Bell

Find out more below

Intune

Today, Microsoft Intune grows into a product family for all things endpoint management at Microsoft.

Published on 12th October 2022

More than ever, we are noticing you, as IT leaders and administrators, embrace Microsoft Intune to power productive and secure work. In the last year, the number of Windows, Android, and iOS devices protected by Intune grew by 60%. More than 80% of new Windows 11 endpoints are cloud-managed from the start. Nearly 50% of Microsoft-managed endpoints are now cloud-connected, compared to less than 20% in 2020. Following your lead, we are updating our product naming to reflect this momentum.

Today, we’re announcing that Microsoft Intune will be the name of the growing product family for all things endpoint management at Microsoft. We are committed to continued investment in the core of Intune with enhancements to the features, performance, and Microsoft 365 integration you expect from us. Another critical part of our vision is building our suite of advanced endpoint management solutions in the cloud, all under the Intune product family. Configuration Manager will remain a key part of that family – and we will continue to meet you where you are with co-management capabilities that help you migrate workloads to the cloud. The name Microsoft Endpoint Manager will no longer be used. Going forward, we’ll refer to cloud management as Microsoft Intune and on-premises management as Microsoft Configuration Manager.

Microsoft Intune is our cloud-based unified endpoint management solution and has become a market leader – managing endpoints across Windows, Android, Mac, iOS, and now Linux operating systems. Like all of Microsoft’s integrated security products, Intune is enabled by the scale and intelligence of the Microsoft Cloud. This allows Intune to deliver stronger device security and compliance as an essential part of a Zero Trust architecture. We are investing in the infrastructure that powers Intune, using data science and AI to further data-driven capabilities, like intelligent automation and remediation. Built into Intune, our advanced management capabilities will help you reduce the total cost of ownership by eliminating the need for adjacent solutions and costly cross-product integration projects. Together, our premium solutions will let you do more with Intune: Simplify and centralize tools, bolster security, and reduce the total cost of ownership, delivering better end-user experiences to everyone in your organization. This new advanced endpoint management plan, expected to be generally available in March 2023, will include Remote Help (currently generally available), Microsoft Tunnel for Mobile Application Management (expected to be generally available January 2023), Endpoint Privilege Management (public preview expected early 2023), as well as advanced endpoint analytics, app patching and packaging, and more.

Of course, as IT administrators, you remain in the driver’s seat – and can choose the right path to the cloud for your organization. Configuration Manager will continue to be updated regularly. Customers who use Configuration Manager can benefit from all that’s coming in Intune by connecting to the cloud. Today, device compliance, configuration settings, and endpoint protection are the three most popular Intune workloads used by cloud-connected Configuration Manager devices. General trends show the other workloads are fast to follow once these are set to scale. If you are interested in connecting your tenant to the cloud, Microsoft’s FastTrack can provide deployment assistance at no additional cost for eligible Microsoft 365 customers. You can also find additional resources in this cloud-based Windows management blog.

We’re excited to build the Intune product family and provide your teams with the tools they need to do what they do best – enable everyone in your organization to do the work they love. We understand each organization’s needs and goals will be different, and we’ll be here to support you along the way. After all, our relationships with our customers have gotten us to where we are today. We’ll continue to listen to your feedback and needs to develop our solutions.

Source

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/endpoint-management-blog/introducing-the-microsoft-intune-product-family/ba-p/3650769

Image Credit

Microsoft

The post Introducing the Microsoft Intune product family appeared first on EasySAM.

]]>