Kieran Jacobsen is a Melbourne based IT professional specialising in Microsoft infrastructure, automation and security. Kieran is Head of Information Technology for Microsoft partner, Readify.
I’m a big fan of Intune’s device compliance policies and Azure Active Directory’s (AAD) conditional access rules. They’re one piece of the puzzle in moving to a Beyond Corp model, that I believe is the future of enterprise networks.
Compliance policies allow us to define what it takes for a device (typically a client) to be considered secure. The rules could include the use of a password, encryption, OS version or even if a device has been jail-broken or rooted. In Intune we can define policies for Windows 8.1 and 10, Windows Phone, macOS, iOS and Android.
One critical thing to highlight is that compliance policies don’t enforce settings and don’t make changes to a device. They’re simply a decision-making tool that allows Intune (and AAD) to determine the status of the device. If we want to make changes to a device, we need to use Intune configuration policies. It’s up to the admin or the user to make a non-compliant device compliant.
A common misconception with compliance policies are that the verification process occurs in real-time, that is, when a user tries to login the device’s compliance status is checked. The check occurs on an hourly basis, though users and admins can trigger off a check manually.
The next piece of the puzzle are conditional access policies. These are policies that allow us to target different sign-in experiences for different applications, devices and user accounts. A user on a compliant device may receive a different sign-in experience to someone using a web browser on some random unknown device.

How compliance policies and conditional access work together

To understand how Compliance Policies and Conditional Access works, let’s look at a user story.
Fred works in the Accounting department at Capital Systems. Fred has a work PC issued by Capital’s IT Team, and a home PC that he bought from a local computer store.
The IT team has defined two Conditional Access policies:

• For Office 365: a user can connect from a compliant device, or needs to pass an MFA check.
• For the finance system: the user can only connect from a compliant device and must pass an MFA check.

How does this work in practice?
When Fred tries to access his email from his work device, perhaps through a browser, AAD will check his device’s compliance status during login. As Fred’s work PC is compliant, it will allow access to his email.
Fred now goes home, on the train he remembers he forgot to reply to an important email. When Fred gets home, he starts his home PC and navigates to the Office 365 portal. This time, AAD doesn’t know the device, so it will treat the device as non-compliant. This time, Fred will be prompted to complete MFA before he can access his email.
Things are different for Fred when he tries to access Capital’s finance system. Fred will be able to access this system from his work PC as its complaint, assuming he completes an MFA request. Fred won’t be able to access this finance system from his home PC as his device isn’t compliant.
These rules allow Capital System’s IT team to govern who can access an application, from what devices they can access it from, and if they need to complete MFA.

Ensuring Spectre and Meltdown Patches are installed

We can use compliance policies to check if a device’s OS version contains the Spectre and Meltdown patches. When Intune checks the devices compliance, if isn’t running with expected patch level, it will be marked as non-compliant.
What does this mean for the user? In Fred’s case, if his work PC lacks those updates, he may receive extra MFA prompts and loose access to the finance system, until he installs the right patches.
The Intune portal and PowerBI can be used to generate reports on device compliance and identify devices that need attention. You can also configure Intune to email a user when their device becomes non-compliant. This email can be customised, I recommend that you include a link to a remediation guide or to your support system.

Configuring Intune Compliance Policies

Compliance policies can be created and modified in the Azure Portal via the Intune panel. Simply navigate to the Device Compliance and then Policies. You’ll need to create a separate policy for each OS that you want to manage compliance.
Within a compliance policy, we specify an OS version using a “major.minor.build” formatted string.
The major versions numbers are:

• Windows 10 – 10.0 Note that the .0 is important*
• Windows 8.1 – 3
• macOS – 10

We can express things like Windows 10 Fall Creators, or macOS High Sierra using the minor version number.

• Windows 10 Fall Creators Update – 10.0.16299
• macOS High Sierra – 10.13

Finally, we can narrow down to a specific release or patch by using the build version number. For instance, the January updates for each platform are:

• Windows 10 Fall Creators Update – 10.0.16299.192
• macOS High Sierra – 10.13.2

You can specify the minimum and maximum OS version by navigating to Properties, Settings and then Device Properties.
 

Setting the minimum Windows 10 version in a compliance policy.

Setting the minimum macOS version in a compliance policy.
Once you have made this change, devices that don’t meet the minimum version will be marked as non-compliant during their next compliance evaluation.

Kieran Jacobsen