If you’re running Microsoft 365 E5, go and check your tenant. There’s a good chance you’re now licensed for tools you’ve been meaning to buy for the last two years.

As of July 2026, Microsoft has folded several premium Intune Suite capabilities directly into E5 licensing, no add-on required. I’ve been doing endpoint security work in this space for a while, and this is the kind of license change that quietly changes project priorities. It’s not flashy, but it matters.

Microsoft’s own announcement covers the details here and here. This post is my take on what actually matters to the people who have to implement it.

Why This Actually Matters

Endpoint management used to mean pushing out policies and calling it a day. That’s not the job any more.

Security teams are now expected to strip out admin rights, secure a workforce that’s half at home and half in the office, get off ageing certificate infrastructure, and actually see what’s happening across their device estate — usually with the same headcount they had five years ago.

Microsoft including these capabilities in E5 by default tells you where they think endpoint security sits now: not as a nice-to-have bolt-on, but as core Zero Trust capability. I’d agree with that read.

What You Actually Get

Microsoft 365 E5 already included everything in E3. Now it also picks up a set of Intune Suite features that used to need separate licensing.

Rolled in from the E3 side:

• Intune Remote Help
• Intune Advanced Analytics
• Intune Plan 2
• Microsoft Tunnel for Mobile Application Management

New on top for E5 customers specifically:

• Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM)
• Microsoft Cloud PKI
• Enterprise Application Management (EAM)

Let’s go through each one, because a bullet list doesn’t tell you why you’d care.

Endpoint Privilege Management: the one I’d deploy first

This is the headline feature, and honestly, it’s the one I’d tackle first if I were prioritising a rollout.

Every environment I’ve worked in has the same story: users get local admin because taking it away breaks something, or generates a wave of helpdesk tickets nobody has time for. And every environment I’ve worked in also knows that standing admin rights are one of the easiest wins for a ransomware operator or anyone else trying to move sideways through a network.

EPM gives you a middle ground. Users stay standard users day to day. Specific approved applications can run elevated. Elevation can be just-in-time rather than permanent, governed by rules you control, and every elevation event gets logged.

In practice, that means an engineer doesn’t need full local admin just to run Wireshark or SQL Server Management Studio. You allow those specific tools to elevate, and the rest of the machine stays locked down. It’s the least-privilege principle without the political fight of ripping admin rights away wholesale.

Microsoft Cloud PKI: retire the certificate server nobody wants to touch

Every organisation I’ve walked into that still runs on-premises Certificate Authorities is running them for the same handful of reasons: Wi-Fi authentication, VPN authentication, and device or user certificates.

And every one of those CAs comes with the same baggage — infrastructure to patch and maintain, certificate lifecycles someone has to track manually, high-availability requirements, and the quiet risk of a CA server nobody’s touched a security update on in eighteen months. You know the one.

Cloud PKI moves certificate issuance, renewal, and revocation into Intune, hosted by Microsoft. For anyone genuinely trying to get off legacy infrastructure rather than just talking about it, this is a real opportunity to switch off that server room CA for good.

Enterprise Application Management: less time repackaging Win32 apps

Packaging and maintaining Win32 applications is unglamorous work, and it eats far more admin time than it should.

Test the update, repackage it, redeploy it, repeat next month. Most endpoint teams have at least one person who spends a disproportionate chunk of their week on exactly this.

EAM pulls from Microsoft’s own catalogue of pre-packaged, kept-current applications, so a good chunk of that churn disappears. For an organisation managing a few thousand endpoints, that’s not a minor convenience — it’s hours back every week and users getting patched software faster.

Intune Advanced Analytics: fewer surprises from the helpdesk

Visibility is still where most endpoint management falls down. You usually find out a device is struggling when the user rings the helpdesk, not before.

Advanced Analytics gives you device performance, endpoint health, user experience and app reliability data, and Microsoft has recently added near real-time device queries, Multi-Device Query, and AI-assisted analytics through Security Copilot.

The practical upshot: you can spot a device that’s about to have a bad boot time, or an app that’s crashing across a subset of your estate, before it turns into forty tickets. That’s the difference between reactive firefighting and actually running the environment.

Intune Remote Help: support without a third-party tool

Remote support tooling is one of those things everyone has, and almost everyone has bolted on from a third party with its own login, its own audit trail, and its own gaps.

Remote Help sits inside the Microsoft security stack instead — Entra authentication, role-based access, compliance-aware access, and every session logged and auditable. For hybrid teams, that’s one fewer vendor relationship and one fewer audit trail to reconcile at year end.

Intune Plan 2: the frontline and specialty device stuff

If your estate is all corporate Windows laptops, this section won’t excite you much. If you’ve got shared devices, rugged Android handhelds, or Zebra scanners on a warehouse floor, it will.

Plan 2 covers specialty and shared device management, stronger Android controls, and Zebra firmware update management. Retail, logistics, manufacturing and healthcare environments tend to get the most out of this — it’s the difference between managing frontline devices properly and managing them by exception.

Microsoft Tunnel for MAM: BYOD without full enrolment

BYOD is still a genuine headache. Users don’t want their personal phone fully enrolled and managed, and honestly, I don’t blame them.

Tunnel for MAM gives you per-app VPN access to internal resources without requiring full device enrolment, so corporate data stays protected without Microsoft — or you — needing visibility into someone’s personal photos and apps. It’s a reasonable compromise, and one that tends to get much less pushback from users than full MDM enrolment.

Security Copilot: still separately licensed, but worth watching

Security Copilot itself isn’t part of this bundle — that’s a separate licence — but Microsoft keeps deepening the integration with Intune: natural language queries against Intune data, AI-assisted KQL generation, risk scoring for EPM elevation requests, and vulnerability remediation guidance.

I’d treat this as a direction of travel rather than a reason to buy anything today. Microsoft is clearly building towards AI-assisted administration as a standard part of endpoint management, not a novelty. Worth keeping an eye on, not worth rushing into.

What This Means If You’re Already on E5

If you’re already licensed for Microsoft 365 E5, none of this requires a procurement conversation. It requires a deployment plan.

Realistically, that means:

• Turning off standing local admin rights via EPM
• Planning the retirement of your legacy on-premises CA
• Cutting down repackaging effort with EAM
• Actually using the visibility Advanced Analytics gives you
• Consolidating remote support onto Remote Help

In my experience, a lot of organisations already own tooling they’ve never turned on. This is a good example — Intune Suite used to be viewed as a nice-to-have upsell, and many teams quietly filed it under ‘later’. For a lot of E5 customers, later is now.

My Final Thoughts

This is one of the more significant endpoint licensing changes I’ve seen in a while, and it didn’t get nearly enough attention when it landed.

Bundling EPM, Cloud PKI, EAM, Advanced Analytics, Remote Help and the rest into E5 makes genuinely enterprise-grade endpoint management accessible to organisations that would previously have had to build a business case for every one of these separately.

If you’re working towards Zero Trust and you’re already on E5, this is worth an afternoon of your time. Go and check what you’re actually entitled to before you plan your next quarter — I’d put money on there being at least one capability in here you’re already paying for and not using.