Endpoint security and identity get sold as two separate categories more often than they should be. In practice, the question is the same one asked from two different angles: does the right person, on the right device, in the right condition, get access to what they need? And does everyone else get blocked without a help desk ticket? Treating them as one discipline instead of two overlapping tools is what keeps an environment both secure and usable.
Identity has become the primary attack surface for most medium and large enterprises. Identity-based attacks now account for roughly 30% of all observed intrusions, according to IBM’s X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, with compromised credentials used in nearly one in three engagements. An endpoint strategy that treats device compliance and identity as separate systems is defending against the wrong half of that problem.
The hardest part of BYOD isn’t the technology. Rather, it is balancing security requirements against an experience employees will tolerate. Overly restrictive policies push people toward workarounds that are less secure than the policy they were avoiding. Classic examples include personal email forwarding, unmanaged cloud storage, and shadow IT.
WEI designs conditional access and compliance policies around what a role needs. On the Intune side, that includes zero-touch provisioning through Windows Autopilot, so a new device is enrolled and complies to policy before it ever reaches the employee. This cuts onboarding time from days to hours and removes a recurring task off the help desk’s plate.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) applied uniformly is exactly the kind of policy that trains employees to look for a way around it. WEI designs conditional MFA that scales with actual risk: a routine login from a known device on a corporate network looks different from an access attempt from an unrecognized device or location. The authentication requirement should reflect that difference instead of treating every login the same.
MFA coverage is only as strong as its weakest gap. Legacy authentication protocols left enabled alongside modern ones, service accounts and API keys carrying more privilege than the people who requested them, and new AI tools employees sign up for each fall outside a policy that only accounts for the applications IT already knows about. WEI’s assessment looks specifically for that gap between what a conditional access policy claims to cover and what’s enforced. This is where the coverage usually breaks down in practice – not in the well-documented applications everyone already remembered to secure.
Identity shouldn’t live in a separate system from the device policies that enforce it. WEI integrates identity providers directly into the endpoint management platform, so a change in employment status, employee role change, or an employee offboarding event each propagate automatically into device access and application entitlements. The same standard applies to non-human identities, service accounts, automation credentials, and API keys, since those routinely carry more standing access than required and get far less scrutiny than a person’s login does.
Conditional Access and MFA changes should be piloted against real applications and user groups before broad enforcement. Legacy authentication, emergency accounts, service identities, and application dependencies can all create unexpected failures. A phased rollout gives IT time to correct gaps, communicate changes, and measure support demand before expanding the policy.
Useful measures may include MFA coverage, blocking risky sign-in attempts, moving privileged roles to just-in-time access, removing inactive accounts, making policy exceptions, and much more.
A WEI endpoint security and identity assessment typically covers:
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