Intune Latency: What’s Actually Improved
I’ve been working with Microsoft Intune for over six years now, and during that time it has changed significantly. What started as a fairly basic MDM solution with limited capabilities has grown into a platform that can handle a wide range of device management scenarios, though not without some growing pains along the way.
When I talk to admins who are hesitant to adopt Intune, or who have already written it off, the most common complaint I hear is performance. “It was slow.” “Policies took forever.” “Devices didn’t sync when I needed them to.” If you used Intune a few years ago, that frustration probably sounds familiar.
A lot of those complaints were fair at the time. What’s worth revisiting now is how much of that experience has changed, particularly around latency and device check-ins.
Why Latency Was Such a Big Deal
Historically, Intune’s challenges weren’t just about performance. Several years ago, it was also missing features many admins expected, especially those coming from mature on-prem management environments. At the same time, expectations were shaped by Group Policy, where changes were predictable and often immediate—you made a change, ran gpupdate, and saw results.
Early cloud MDM didn’t behave that way. Feature gaps were paired with slow or inconsistent policy application, and sync actions weren’t always reliable. Troubleshooting often became guesswork: Did the device actually check in, or is my policy not working?
That combination of missing capabilities and unpredictable timing made distrust understandable, even as Intune continued to expand and mature.
What the Numbers Look Like Today
At Microsoft Ignite this year, Microsoft shared updated Intune device check-in metrics that reflect how the service behaves at scale today:
99% of Intune-enrolled devices check in within 25 minutes
50% of Intune-enrolled devices check in within 5 minutes
These numbers don’t mean Intune is instant, and they don’t guarantee identical behavior in every environment. But they do show that device communication is far more responsive than it used to be.
For most day-to-day administration tasks, this translates into quicker feedback and fewer situations where delays are the primary unknown.
Smarter Check-Ins, Not Just Faster Ones
What’s just as important as raw speed is how Intune prioritizes device communication. Not all check-ins are treated equally, and that prioritization plays a big role in how responsive the platform feels.
Intune gives higher priority to devices in scenarios such as:
Newly enrolled devices
Manual actions like Sync, Wipe, or Retire from the admin portal
Devices reporting critical alerts, including compliance issues
Devices reporting remediation results from previous check-ins
Devices that haven’t checked in recently
Devices where configuration drift has been detected
This doesn’t eliminate delays entirely, but it does mean that time-sensitive actions are less likely to sit idle behind routine background processing.
What This Looks Like in the Real World
In practice, these improvements change how Intune behaves during common admin workflows.
Rolling out a compliance policy no longer involves long, unpredictable delays before Conditional Access enforcement occurs. Remediation scripts tend to report back more predictably. Wipe and retire actions usually respond quickly enough to be useful during real incidents, not just audits.
Troubleshooting also becomes more straightforward. When something doesn’t apply, it’s easier to rule out basic communication delays and focus on configuration issues instead.
Lower latency doesn’t remove all complexity, but it does remove a layer of uncertainty.
Final Thoughts
Intune still has tradeoffs. Cloud management always will. Network conditions, device state, and service dependencies don’t disappear just because things are faster than they used to be.
But latency is no longer the defining weakness it once was, and that alone changes how practical Intune feels in daily administration.
If your opinion of Intune is based on experiences from several years ago, it’s worth reassessing with current behavior in mind. The platform hasn’t reinvented itself—but it has matured in ways that are noticeable where it counts.
