What feature allows Intune to control how applications access data on devices?

Windows Information Protection (WIP) is the feature that enables Intune to manage how applications access and interact with data on devices. WIP allows organizations to protect their sensitive information by controlling which apps can access their data and providing protection regardless of whether the data is on managed or unmanaged devices. This feature helps prevent data leakage by ensuring that only approved applications can interact with corporate data, and it applies encryption to protect sensitive information.

For instance, when a user attempts to copy corporate data from a protected app to a non-protected app, WIP can block or restrict that action, effectively safeguarding the organization's data from unauthorized access or sharing. This level of control is critical in environments where data security is paramount.

In contrast, options like device compliance policies and user authentication methods primarily focus on ensuring that devices and users meet certain security criteria, but they do not specifically manage application access to data. Application whitelisting, while it restricts which applications can run on devices, does not inherently manage how those applications access or handle data. Thus, WIP stands out as the key mechanism for controlling data accessibility in a granular manner within the Intune framework.