For many years, the Group Policy feature of Microsoft’s Windows has been the go-to solution for controlling workstations, providing deployment, and in general, making a network manageable by information professionals. It does, however, require a traditional domain with an Active Directory deployment — many users already have an Active Directory (AD) and will have an AD domain for many years into the future.
What if you didn’t have such a domain to deal with, or were starting over fresh with a totally distributed network linked together only by cloud connections? You would probably turn to Microsoft’s Intune, a cloud-based unified endpoint management service for both corporate and bring-your-own-device technology. Intune extends the functionality of some Active Directory features and that of the Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager to the Microsoft Azure cloud.