Securing Your Intune Tenant: An Operational Hardening Plan for Enterprise Admins

Microsoft's Intune Customer Success team published a security hardening guide in March 2026. The official post is useful, but it stops at principles. This article turns that guidance into an operational plan you can run in a real tenant: inventory admin access, reduce standing privilege, protect portal sign-in, add approval gates for destructive actions, and prove the controls are working before you widen scope.

Read this alongside the Intune hub, Conditional Access Microsoft 365 Policy Map, Entra ID P1 vs P2 comparison, and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Intune rollout.

Who This Guide Is For

This guide is for Microsoft 365 and endpoint administrators responsible for:

• Intune admin centre access and delegated operational roles
• Entra ID role assignments that include Intune workload permissions
• Conditional Access policies affecting admin portal sign-in
• Change control for wipe, retire, compliance, and assignment changes

It assumes you already manage devices through Intune and can make Entra ID policy changes with appropriate approval.

What Microsoft Is Asking You To Fix

The official guidance groups tenant risk into three areas:

1. Administrative privilege hygiene — too many users hold broad Intune or Global Administrator rights permanently
2. Authentication security — privileged identities still protected by weak MFA methods
3. Change control — high-impact Intune operations can execute without a second approver

None of these are theoretical. Compromised admin accounts, credential phishing, and insider mistakes are the practical drivers.

Phase 1: Inventory Standing Admin Access

Before changing roles, export who can touch Intune today.

Intune built-in and custom roles

In the Intune admin centre:

1. Go to Tenant administration > Roles
2. Open each role with assignments: Intune Administrator, Cloud Device Administrator, Application Administrator (where used for app deployment), and any custom roles
3. For each role, open Assignments and record user and group members

Build a register with one row per person:

Entra privileged roles that overlap Intune

Some admins never appear in Intune role blades because they hold Entra roles with broader rights. Check Microsoft Entra ID > Roles and administrators for:

• Global Administrator
• Privileged Role Administrator
• Cloud Application Administrator (app consent and enterprise app changes)

An Intune role review that ignores Entra privileged roles is incomplete.

Graph export for evidence

Connect-MgGraph -Scopes "RoleManagement.Read.Directory","DeviceManagementConfiguration.Read.All"

Get-MgRoleManagementDirectoryRoleDefinition -Filter "displayName eq 'Intune Administrator'" |
    ForEach-Object {
        Get-MgRoleManagementDirectoryRoleAssignment -Filter "roleDefinitionId eq '$($_.Id)'" -All
    }

Expected output shape: assignment records with principal IDs you can map back to users and groups.

Phase 2: Apply Least Privilege To Intune Roles

Replace broad defaults with scoped custom roles

Built-in Intune Administrator is convenient but broad. For day-to-day operators, prefer custom roles scoped to the workloads they actually manage:

Create custom roles in Tenant administration > Roles > Create.

Remove stale delegations

During inventory, flag:

• Former employees or contractors still assigned
• Admins with both Global Administrator and Intune Administrator without documented need
• Service accounts with interactive admin roles
• Vendor accounts with permanent access instead of time-bound PIM activation

Removal order:

1. Confirm the account is not used in automation with stored credentials
2. Remove Intune role assignment
3. Remove overlapping Entra privileged role if no longer required
4. Record the change in your access review log

Phase 3: Protect Admin Sign-In With Conditional Access

Intune portal access should not rely on password plus SMS MFA alone.

Minimum admin CA baseline

Create or verify policies that apply to Intune admin groups:

Use the Conditional Access policy map to place these without breaking emergency access.

Exclude break-glass correctly

Maintain two or more break-glass accounts:

• Stored offline with monitored usage alerts
• Excluded from policies that would block recovery during an identity outage
• Keep phishing-resistant MFA available and verify both accounts at least every 90 days; custom CA exclusions do not bypass Microsoft mandatory MFA

Do not exclude regular admins "temporarily" and forget to remove the exclusion.

Phase 4: Move Standing Privilege To PIM

For ordinary admin roles, use PIM with the applicable Entra ID P2 or Governance entitlement. Keep designated emergency Global Administrator accounts permanently active, as Microsoft’s emergency-access design requires, rather than making them depend on PIM activation.

Typical candidates:

• Intune Administrator
• Global Administrator (only where still justified)
• Privileged Role Administrator

Activation requirements to consider:

• Approval from a second administrator
• MFA on activation
• Maximum activation duration of 1–8 hours
• justification text required

After migration, verify effective permissions for the intended role. Direct Intune RBAC assignments and group-based access can still grant privileges independently of the Entra role being tested.

Phase 5: Enable Multi Admin Approval For Destructive Workloads

Multi Admin Approval (MAA) adds a second-administrator gate for selected high-impact Intune operations.

Review which operations your security team cares about most. Common candidates:

• Remote wipe
• Retire device
• Change to compliance policy assignments affecting production groups
• Bulk assignment changes to critical configuration profiles

Configuration path:

1. Tenant administration > Multi Admin Approval
2. Create approval rules for the selected workload types
3. Assign approvers who are not the same people as requestors
4. Pilot with the endpoint engineering group before tenant-wide policy objects

Before enabling protection, validate the manager, requestor and approver permissions and directly assigned approver security group against Microsoft’s current MAA requirements. After a second administrator approves, the requestor must complete the request. Document turnaround and recovery; configure working approver RBAC before protecting role changes.

Phase 6: Validate The Controls

After each phase, collect evidence.

Access validation

• A standard helpdesk account should not see tenant administration blades
• A policy author should not retire devices unless explicitly granted
• PIM activation should appear in Entra audit logs with justification

Sign-in validation

• Attempt Intune portal sign-in from a noncompliant personal device using an admin account — should block if CA requires compliant device
• Attempt activation without phishing-resistant MFA — should fail for the protected group

MAA validation

• Test approval with a reversible configuration change first; a wipe test requires a disposable device, verified recovery and explicit authorisation to erase it
• Confirm the operation stays pending until a second admin approves
• Confirm rejection leaves the device unchanged

Rollback And Exception Handling

Every exception should have an owner, expiry date, and linked risk ticket.

Prevention Checks Going Forward

Add these to quarterly access review:

• Intune role assignments match current job function
• No new permanent Global Administrator assignments without CAB approval
• Admin CA policies still include phishing-resistant MFA
• PIM activations reviewed for unusual after-hours patterns
• MAA approvers still active and segregated from requestors

Related Resources

• Conditional Access Microsoft 365 Policy Map
• Entra ID P1 vs P2
• Hardening Windows 11 with CIS Benchmark Level 1
• Intune Compliance Policy Not Evaluating
• BitLocker Recovery Key Not Backed Up to Entra

Source

This operational plan is based on the official Intune Customer Success security hardening post published by Microsoft on March 14, 2026, extended with Entra ID role management, Conditional Access, and PIM implementation steps for enterprise administrators.

Correction record

10 September 2026 — Reviewed against documentation: Clarified emergency MFA and permanent active recovery roles, PIM boundaries, MAA prerequisites and safe validation.