Welcome to our blog series on Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility + Security (previously the Enterprise Mobility Suite).  This suite of products (known as EMS) provides a number of features to enhance identity and security both on-premises and in the cloud.  As more organizations are moving towards a hybrid model of hosted cloud services, public cloud resources, and on-premises hardware, it is more important now than ever before to empower your users to access these systems with greater ease while still enforcing your company's security policies at all times.

Enterprise Mobility + Security is comprised of five major products. Throughout this blog series, we will be discussing the features of these products in more detail.

Main Products of Enterprise Mobility + Security

• Azure Active Directory Premium – This solution is focused on centralizing and securing your user accounts. Too many systems have independent logins making it hard for users to keep track of all their accounts.  Azure AD Premium is focused on linking those logins to your Active Directory, and then securing and monitoring access to ensure only your employees are using their accounts.
• Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS) – The newest component of EMS complements Azure AD Premium and focuses on cloud applications. With the proliferation of new cloud apps MCAS helps you to identify what cloud apps are in use and, where necessary, restrict or protect user access.
• Microsoft Intune – Intune is a combined device and app management solution. Once AD Premium secures the users, it is important to make sure that the devices the users are working on are also secured.  Whether it is a laptop, iPhone, Android, or any type of tablet Intune can help to ensure that the device is safe and secured before company content is added to the device.
• Azure Information Protection – So far the users and the devices have been secured, and with Azure Information Protection it is taken a step further and the data itself is secured.  With these solutions the security and privacy restrictions travel with the data so that you can feel safe that even if data leaves your organization it is still protected.
• Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA) – The final component of EMS focuses on the on-premises environment. The core of all of the features in EMS is the user identity and that is centralized in your on-premises Active Directory.  ATA focuses on your user accounts and not only looks for common threats but also uses machine learning to monitor and analyze user activity to ensure that your accounts are not compromised or misused.

EMS currently comes in two versions – E3 and E5.  The majority of the features we will be discussing in this series are included in E3, which is the same as the Enterprise Mobility Suite that you may have heard about in the past.  However, some of the newest and most interesting security features are part of the E5 suite which we will be highlighting as well.

To get us started we will be focusing on Azure Active Directory Premium.  In our next blog we will be discussing one of the features most commonly deployed first in EMS and that is Self Service Password Reset with Writeback.