Microsoft Intune for Small Businesses: Device Management Without an IT Department

The device management problem for small businesses

When a small business grows past 5 people, device management becomes a real problem. You have laptops in different locations, phones accessing company email, and no way to know whether they're all encrypted and up to date.

The typical response is one of three things:

1Nothing - hope for the best, deal with problems when they happen

2Manual IT visits - expensive, slow, doesn't scale

3A contracted IT person - costly, and they can only be in one place at a time

Microsoft Intune is the fourth option: a cloud-based device management platform that lets you control every company device from a single dashboard, regardless of where those devices are.

What Intune actually does

Intune sits between your devices and your company's cloud accounts. When a device tries to access Microsoft 365 email, Teams, or SharePoint, Intune checks whether that device meets your security requirements first.

What you can enforce from the Intune console:

BitLocker disk encryption - automatically enabled on all Windows devices

Password policies - minimum length, complexity, lockout after failed attempts

Windows Update rings - devices automatically install updates within a defined window, not whenever the employee gets around to it

App deployment - push approved software to every device silently

Conditional Access - block login from unmanaged or non-compliant devices

What you can do when something goes wrong:

Remote lock - lock a device immediately if it's lost or stolen

Remote wipe - delete all company data from the device; the employee's personal files remain untouched

Retire - unenrol a device from management (used when someone leaves the company)

What it costs and what's included

Intune is included in Microsoft 365 Business Premium at approximately €22/user/month. For a 10-person business, that's around €220/month - which also includes Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Microsoft Defender endpoint protection.

If you need Intune without the full M365 suite (for managing Macs in a Google Workspace environment, for example), standalone Intune licences are available at approximately €8/user/month.

Macs and iPhones, managed the same way

Intune manages Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. Mac management requires Apple Business Manager integration, which takes a few hours to configure. iPhone and Android management is simpler and covers the key requirements (email profile, remote wipe, VPN if needed).