If you are already paying for Microsoft 365 Business Premium, you have bought Intune. At AU$32.90 per user per month on an annual subscription, Business Premium bundles device and application management, identity controls and Microsoft's security stack into a licence most Australian SMEs are buying anyway. That raises a fair question from anyone looking at an RMM quote: if endpoint management is already in the bill, what is the agent on the laptop for?
The honest answer is that Intune and an RMM platform overlap on about a third of the job and diverge sharply on the rest. Working out which one you need — or whether you need both — is easier once you separate what each tool manages from what someone has to do with it.
What the licensing actually costs
Microsoft's Australian pricing, observed on 26 October 2026, puts the relevant plans at AU$10.50 per user per month for Business Basic, AU$21.00 for Business Standard and AU$32.90 for Business Premium, all paid yearly. The step from Standard to Premium is AU$11.90 per user per month, or AU$142.80 per user per year. For a 40-person business that is AU$5,712 a year to move from a productivity licence to one that includes Intune, Entra ID P1-grade identity controls and Defender for Business.
On enterprise licensing, Intune capability also ships inside the Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 plans, and Microsoft sells Intune Suite as an add-on at AU$15.00 per user per month, paid yearly. Intune Suite is where the gap-filling features live — remote help, endpoint privilege management, advanced analytics — and it is worth knowing it exists before you conclude Intune cannot do remote control.
Those numbers are the cheap part of the comparison. The expensive part is unlicensed: configuration, enrolment, packaging, exception handling and someone answering the phone when a device fails compliance at 7am.
What Intune manages well
Intune is Microsoft's cloud-native platform for device, application, configuration and compliance management, and within that scope it is genuinely strong:
- Windows Autopilot provisioning. A new laptop ships from the supplier to the staff member's home, they sign in with their work account, and the device builds itself. No imaging, no desk visit, no USB stick.
- Configuration profiles and security baselines. BitLocker, firewall settings, Defender policy, browser hardening, local administrator control — defined centrally and applied by policy rather than by a technician.
- Compliance policies tied to Conditional Access. This is the capability that justifies the licence for most businesses. You can require that a device is encrypted, patched, running endpoint protection and known to the tenant before it is allowed to reach Exchange, SharePoint or Teams.
- Application deployment. Required and available apps, Microsoft 365 Apps servicing channels, Win32 packaging and the Enterprise App Catalog.
- Mobile device and mobile application management. Including app-level protection on personal phones without enrolling the whole device.
- Device retirement and remote actions. Wipe, retire, rotate the BitLocker key, revoke the session.
If your fleet is modern Windows and Apple hardware, your users are distributed, and your controls need to follow identity rather than the office network, Intune is the correct platform and no RMM replicates the Conditional Access integration.
Where Intune stops
Intune manages devices. An RMM manages a service. The gaps are consistent and they are the reason the question keeps coming up:
- Third-party application patching. Intune handles Microsoft estate well. Chrome, Adobe Reader, Zoom, 7-Zip, a dozen line-of-business applications and the vendor-specific updaters that come with them are not covered to the same standard, and the ACSC lists patching applications as one of the Essential Eight mitigation strategies in its own right.
- Remote monitoring and alerting. Disk health, failing memory, backup job failures, a server running hot, a UPS on battery. Intune reports compliance state; it is not a monitoring platform.
- Remote control. Available through Intune Suite's Remote Help, but it is a separate line item and a different workflow from the one-click session technicians expect.
- Ticketing and service desk. There is no queue, no SLA clock, no user-facing request channel.
- Scripting and remediation at scale. Intune can run remediation scripts, but RMM platforms are built around a library of automations and the operational habit of using them.
- Network and infrastructure. Switches, firewalls, on-premises servers, hypervisors and NAS devices sit outside Intune entirely.
- Backup. Not included at any licence tier, and retention is not backup.
- Hardware lifecycle and warranty. Asset age, warranty expiry, procurement and disposal.
- Response outside business hours. A policy does not triage itself.
The comparison that actually matters
Put plainly: the real decision is not Intune versus RMM. It is Intune plus service delivery versus an RMM platform plus separate security tooling. Both paths end up at a managed fleet. They just arrive carrying different bills.
If you take the Intune path, you are buying the control plane with your Microsoft licence and then paying for the configuration, the third-party patching capability, the monitoring, the service desk and the after-hours response. If you take the RMM path, you are paying for a platform that does patching, monitoring, remote control and automation out of the box, and then adding identity-based access control, device compliance enforcement and Conditional Access — which, for a Microsoft 365 tenant, means Intune anyway.
For most Australian SMEs already on Business Premium, the sensible answer is Intune as the policy and compliance authority for endpoints, with an RMM or equivalent tooling layered on for patching breadth, monitoring and remediation. That is how a managed modern workplace is normally built: one source of truth for device trust, a second layer for the operational work Microsoft does not do, and a defined team responsible for both.
A simple way to read your own position:
| What you need | Intune covers it | Needs RMM or managed service |
|---|---|---|
| Zero-touch Windows provisioning | Yes, via Autopilot | No |
| Block non-compliant devices from company data | Yes, with Conditional Access | No |
| Patch Microsoft 365 Apps and Windows | Yes | No |
| Patch 20 third-party applications reliably | Partially | Yes |
| Monitor server and network hardware | No | Yes |
| Remote control a user's desktop | Via Intune Suite add-on | Commonly yes |
| Log a ticket and track an SLA | No | Yes |
| Respond to an alert at 2am | No | Yes |
| Back up Microsoft 365 data | No | Yes, separate product |
What decides whether the licence becomes a managed fleet
Endpoint projects rarely fail because the licence was wrong. They fail at the boundary between policy design and the actual state of the devices. The recurring causes are worth knowing before you commit to a date:
Group Policy and Intune applying at once. Co-managed or hybrid-joined devices receiving overlapping settings from both sources produce behaviour nobody designed and nobody can reproduce on demand. Deciding which authority owns which setting is a design decision, not a toggle.
Conditional Access enforced before break-glass accounts are tested. Emergency access accounts need to exist, be excluded from the policies, have credentials stored somewhere the IT team can reach without signing in, and be verified to work. Enabling device-compliance requirements before that testing is complete is the single most common way to lock an organisation out of its own tenant.
Compliance policies that outrun deployment. A policy requiring BitLocker, Secure Boot and endpoint protection will mark devices non-compliant the moment it is assigned if those controls have not actually been rolled out. With Conditional Access live, non-compliant means no email.
Mixed device classes. A standardised fleet of recent Windows laptops is a different project from one with shared workstations, Macs, older Windows editions, specialised peripherals and a legacy application that needs local administrator rights. Scope by device class and exception, not by headcount.
BYOD and contractors. Personal phones and contractor laptops need a separate access design — app protection policies, limited session controls, or a published-app model — rather than being enrolled as if they were corporate assets.
Devices that rarely connect. Policy arrives when the device checks in. Kiosks, warehouse terminals and seasonal laptops drift.
Where to start
Pull your current licence mix and count how many users are already on Business Premium, then list every device that is not a current-generation Windows or Mac laptop managed by your main identity. That second list — the shared PCs, the legacy application hosts, the contractor machines, the phones — is what determines whether Intune alone will carry your fleet or whether you need tooling beside it. Most businesses are surprised by its length.
If you want that assessed rather than estimated, Precision IT will review your tenant and device inventory and give you a written scope: which controls Intune can enforce on your fleet as it stands, which devices need remediation first, what third-party patching and monitoring coverage is missing, and a per-user monthly figure for licences and managed service so you can compare it against your current spend. If the answer is that your existing arrangement is fine, we will say so. Request a consultation and we will book the review.