Important
Microsoft Defender for Business is now in preview, and will roll out gradually to customers and IT Partners who sign-up here to request it. We will onboard an initial set of customers and partners in the coming weeks and will expand the preview leading up to general availability. Note that preview will launch with an initial set of scenarios, and we will be adding capabilities regularly.
Some information in this article relates to prereleased products/services that might be substantially modified before they are commercially released. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, for the information provided here.
Policy order in Microsoft Defender for Business
Microsoft Defender for Business (preview) includes predefined policies to help ensure the devices your employees use are protected. Your security team can add new policies as well. For example, suppose that you want to apply certain settings to some devices, and different settings to other devices. You can do that by adding policies, such as next-generation protection policies or firewall policies.
As policies are added, you’ll notice that an order of priority is assigned. You can edit the order of priority for the policies that you define, but you cannot change the order of priority for default policies. For example, suppose that for your Windows client devices, you have three next-generation protection policies. In this case, your default policy is number 3 in priority. You can change the order of your policies that are numbered 1 and 2, but the default policy will remain number 3 in your list.
The important thing to remember about multiple policies is that devices will receive the first applied policy only. Referring to our earlier example of three next-generation policies, suppose that you have devices that are targeted by all three policies. In this case, those devices will receive policy number 1, but will not receive policies numbered 2 and 3.
Key points to remember about policy order
- Policies are assigned an order of priority
- Devices receive the first applied policy only
- You can change the order of priority for policies
- Default policies are given the lowest order of priority