Heads-up, Apple-in-the-enterprise admins. One of many greatest annual occasions for Apple IT professionals, Jamf Nation Person Convention, rolled round this week in Austin, TX. 

Led by new CEO John Strosahl, the corporate provided up a variety of bulletins, enhancements, and insights from third-party presenters, together with Cisco CIO Fletcher Previn. Michael Covington, Jamf vp of portfolio technique, mentioned the advance of the Mac into the enterprise house, and pressured how his firm’s options assist present the form of digital enterprise stability — even for distant enterprises — that companies want right this moment.

Listed here are the highlights of this yr’s occasion.

Macs are good for enterprise

Previn is known for his work launching a extremely profitable company-wide worker alternative scheme when he was at IBM. That effort  proved that Macs lower your expenses and increase engagement and productiveness. He returned to JNUC to share his expertise at Cisco, the place 60% of staff now use Macs (and 24% of PC customers swap platforms once they get the prospect to improve).

Primarily based on Cisco knowledge drawn from throughout a 130,000-strong workforce, he detailed why it’s shrewd enterprise to go Mac:

• Macs are as much as $395 per machine cheaper to run than PCs.
• Gross sales groups utilizing Macs outperform PC counterparts with 9.8% extra offers.
• Software program engineers generated 11.5% extra code on a Mac.
• Staff utilizing Macs and iPhones had 83% IT satisfaction.
• And Mac customers see nearly 5 occasions fewer cyberthreats — and 9 occasions fewer virus points — than PCs.

Jamf Professional 11 good points usability and extra

The pleasure of the corporate’s portfolio, Jamf Professional, is thesomething Apple directors use day-after-day. Introduced on the occasion, Jamf Professional 11 sports activities an easier-to-navigate consumer interface, higher accessibility instruments, new shortcuts to get to the most well-liked workflows, and built-in help for Apple’s Declarative Gadget Administration (DDM).

The latter makes for important enhancements in software program replace administration workflows. Gadgets may defer updates earlier than, which meant admins needed to pursue customers to improve — notably when dealing with safety challenges. With DDM help now in Jamf Professional, directors can specify a date and time for updates, making certain profitable execution whereas promptly notifying finish customers.

Which means IT can schedule and implement the set up of software program updates on managed units, together with Apple’s Fast Safety Response upgrades.

For brand new customers, the onboarding system is now extra clear so new hires can see what’s happening; the corporate additionally streamlined its help for consumer enrollment and single sign-on.

Generative AI involves Apple IT

For a lot of, generative AI feels prefer it burst onto the scene originally of 2023. At present, most corporations, together with Apple, are exploring the expertise. Jamf isn’t any completely different and is utilizing this sort of AI to assist energy its help providers.

The concept is that Jamf admins can ask it questions and obtain solutions to assist resolve points.

The corporate has a second imaginative and prescient to help safety with genAI, combining uncooked telemetry and safety alert knowledge with the MITRE assault framework to flag assaults and advise admins on acceptable safety mitigations.

Jamf CTO Beth Tschida took time to elucidate how this can work. “Within the realm of endpoint safety, it’s changing into dangerously frequent for safety duties to be piled on to IT admins,” she stated. “They’re given instruments they’ll’t use and knowledge they’ll’t interpret, and the scenario isn’t in contrast to forcing an untrained flight crew to land a aircraft. It’s all superb and good till an organization will get compromised and discovers that they’d alerts alongside the way in which that would have saved them.

“By leaning on [genAI], we’re in a position to quickly give even entry stage analysts a place to begin and the flexibility to quickly triage the alerts they’re receiving and make well timed choices about what to do,” she stated.

Safety, safety and Jamf Shield

Compliance is a giant deal for enterprise safety, which is why the flexibility to test managed units in opposition to compliance coverage is a helpful addition to Jamf Shield.

It lets admins test for total compliance, and lets them see which apps and OS variations in use throughout their surroundings are impacted by recognized Widespread Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). The concept is that admins can get good perception into the safety (or in any other case) of their deployed units.

All the identical, safety isn’t safety if motion past the perimeter isn’t additionally managed; that is the place enhancements to Jamf Join kick in, this time with a lot better help for Zero Belief Community Entry, which is now integrated. The concept is that this brings least-privilege, high-performance connectivity to cloud and on-premises knowledge assets from macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Android and Home windows units.

Safety isn’t nearly digital doorways — it’s additionally about actual ones. Jamf now companions with SwiftConnect to supply digital worker badges utilized in iPhones or Apple Watch to entry buildings and workplaces.

At JNUC, the corporate enhanced its system. Which means managed units will share system danger alerts or consumer occasions knowledge to quickly disable a digital worker badge if one thing appears remiss. The concept is that miscreants can’t use hacked or stolen units to entry important enterprise infrastructure.

Lastly, in an in depth presentation on the present, Jamf Senior Risk Researcher Ferdous Saljooki took attendees by means of an in-depth technical take a look at state-sponsored malware lately used to undermine Mac safety.

Schooling, the unique mass deployment

One of many highlights from Jamf final yr was details about how the nation of Taiwan deployed 400,000 iPads throughout faculty college students in only a few weeks.

Challenges like these are bread and butter to schooling IT crews who frequently handle large-scale deployments in a short while. The extent of those typically dwarfs these managed by enterprise IT, so it’s pure that Jamf serves this, its authentic market.

At JNUC 2023, the corporate improved the UI of its schooling centered merchandise and launched further options to assist cut back the ache of schooling IT. Which means app installers, content material filtering, and a lot better instruments to handle and require compliance, to not point out additional enchancment within the administration and deployment of shared units.

The corporate has additionally launched on-device in- and out-bound content material filtering for supervised units working Jamf Secure Web.