Use advanced insights to support risk-based policy decisions

  • 10 minutes

In this unit, you will learn how to transition from static, binary compliance checks to dynamic, risk-based policy enforcement by using Microsoft Intune Advanced Analytics, Endpoint Analytics, and custom compliance data.

Traditional endpoint management often relies on static compliance rules-for example, checking whether a device is running Windows 11. However, in a Zero Trust environment, a device running an up-to-date operating system might still exhibit anomalous behavior, suffer from constant application crashes, or face failing hardware. By using advanced insights, administrators can design policies that adapt to the real-time health and risk context of the device.

Transition from static checks to risk-based decisions

A static policy evaluates a hardcoded state. A risk-based policy evaluates the context of the device's behavior over time.

  • The limitation of static policies: A standard compliance policy checks if Microsoft Defender Antivirus is running. If it is running, the device is marked Compliant and granted access to corporate data. However, this check ignores whether the device is experiencing severe performance degradation or anomalous background activity that hasn't triggered a specific malware signature yet.
  • The risk-based advantage: By feeding advanced analytics and threat signals into your policy engine, you can create a sliding scale of trust. If a device's risk level elevates slightly due to anomalous network connections, you can use Microsoft Entra Conditional Access to prompt the user for multifactor authentication (MFA) rather than issuing a hard block. If the risk level spikes to High, you automatically sever access.

Use Endpoint Analytics for proactive policy adjustments

Endpoint Analytics provides deep visibility into how your devices are performing in the real world. You can use these insights to directly inform how you structure your compliance and configuration policies.

  • Application Reliability: If the Endpoint Analytics dashboard shows a sudden spike in crashes for your core VPN client following a recent OS update, you can make an immediate, data-driven policy decision. You can pause your Intune Windows Update rings to prevent the issue from spreading, and deploy a proactive remediation script to restart the failing service on affected devices.
  • Battery and Hardware Health: Instead of waiting for a user's laptop to completely die (leading to lost productivity and emergency helpdesk tickets), you can use hardware insights to proactively identify batteries that have degraded past a critical threshold. You can then replace the hardware before it impacts the user's ability to meet compliance requirements.
  • Anomaly Detection: Intune Advanced Analytics uses machine learning to establish a baseline of "normal" behavior for your tenant. If it detects a sudden anomaly-such as a 300% increase in Blue Screens of Death (BSODs) on a specific Lenovo model-you can temporarily exclude that specific device model from your strict compliance enforcement while you investigate the bad OEM driver.

Integrate custom compliance for deep system insights

When native compliance settings don't cover a specific advanced insight your security team requires, you can build Custom Compliance Policies.

Custom compliance allows you to execute a PowerShell script (on Windows) or a Bash script (on macOS) to discover custom telemetry and base a compliance decision on the result.

  • The Scenario: Your security team receives threat intelligence about a new zero-day vulnerability that exploits a specific, obscure Windows registry key and a running background service.
  • The Insight Gathering: You write a discovery script that queries the endpoint for that exact registry key and service state, outputting the result in JSON format.
  • The Policy Decision: You upload this script to Intune and create a Custom Compliance Policy. If the script detects the vulnerable registry key, Intune immediately flags the device as Noncompliant. Microsoft Entra Conditional Access then blocks the device from accessing Office 365 until the vulnerability is patched, effectively closing the zero-day gap using your own custom insights.

AI-assisted analysis with Microsoft Copilot for Security

Microsoft Copilot for Security is a natural-language AI layer that spans Microsoft's security products, letting admins and analysts investigate, summarize, and act on signals using plain-language prompts instead of hand-crafted queries. When paired with Intune, it surfaces device, compliance, and policy insights conversationally - turning multi-step report drilling into a single question.

  • Intune integration: The Security Copilot plugin for Intune lets admins ask questions like "Show me all noncompliant devices with a High risk score" or "Summarize policy changes made in the last 7 days", and returns answers grounded in live Intune data.
  • Licensing note: Requires Microsoft Copilot for Security capacity (SCU-based), which is licensed separately from the Intune Suite.

Real-world scenario: Data-driven Conditional Access

To see how advanced insights inform policy, consider the lifecycle of an application rollout:

  1. The Insight: Your IT team rolls out a new Data Loss Prevention (DLP) agent to all Windows laptops. Within 24 hours, Endpoint Analytics flags a severe anomaly: boot times have increased by 4 minutes, and the DLP agent is crashing randomly.
  2. The Policy Adjustment: Because the DLP agent is currently unstable, enforcing a strict compliance rule that requires the agent to be running 100% of the time will accidentally lock hundreds of users out of their email via Conditional Access.
  3. The Data-Driven Action: Armed with the analytics data, the IT architect temporarily changes the Intune compliance policy from Require to Report-only for the DLP agent. This allows users to continue working without disruption while the IT team uses the advanced diagnostic logs to work with the vendor on a patch.

By using analytics to guide your policy configurations, you ensure that your security controls don't inadvertently destroy the Digital Employee Experience (DEX).