An introduction to conditional access in ConfigMgr (current branch)

Do you want to keep non-compliant devices from accessing critical company data and prevent otherwise authenticated end users from opening their Exchange store from a non-compliant device, whether it is hosted or on-premise?

Oh snap, y’all.

While that is some really nice functionality, if you have ConfigMgr deployed and are feeling froggy – you can go waaaaaaaaaaaay beyond MDM.

Here’s where the conditional access chickens come home to roost, and your investment in Office 365 gets weaponized.

You see, when your Exchange and Sharepoint services are already in the cloud (remember, the magic IT thing?) and you have a management conduit to those services (a la ConfigMgr service connection points) that enables you to do unicorn-level rocket ship engineering with just a few clicks.

Hint: If you need some background on integrations available with ConfigMgr read this article on TechNet.

Let’s dig a little deeper and see how this works. The following diagram is taken from this TechNet article covering ConfigMgr 2012 R2 and shows the basic workflow for conditional access:

The first thing you’ll notice is that two things are checked before conditional access:

1. Am I targeted by a policy?
2. Am I exempted from the targeted policy?

If you are not targeted or are exempted from that policy, then the device is permitted to connect to the service.

If the device is non-compliant in any way, whether that policy comes from Intune or ConfigMgr, or the device is not joined to an authorized domain it will be denied access to the protected service.

Why is this important?

It’s pretty simple – by combining ConfigMgr with Intune (and EMS!) and leveraging the conditional access feature set you are able to limit or deny access to services and data that properly authenticated end users would otherwise be able to obtain and potentially exfiltrate – with no additional systems or software.

Of course, there are some limitations and gotchas here – depending on the device operating system, whether the device is managed by standalone ConfigMgr or a hybrid implementation with Intune… and the specifics of your Office 365 subscription.

Interested? Make sure you check here ‘before you start’ start any implementation design.