It was a big year for Apple in the venture

Between WWDC 2021 and the upcoming WWDC 2022, Apple has made significant changes that impact the enterprise community. It’s worth looking back at what’s changed and what that might mean moving forward.

Positive management

One of the biggest changes goes back to last year’s conference. Positive management is the most significant change to Apple’s MDM (mobile device management) architecture since its inception in 2010.

The advantage of affirmative management is that it transfers much of the policy management to the devices themselves, rather than having configuration profiles on each device that requires it to check in with MDM service and report its state. Positive management allows the devices to track their performance against the detailed set of assurances. Devices only need to be connected when they are not compliant or when they receive new confirmations. So, devices can manage their situation without the need for fixed or repeated connections.

This is a great thing, even if many of the configuration options are remarkably similar to the MDM capabilities. It reduces network congestion and response time on the device. As Apple and other MDM vendors move to fully cloud-based solutions, these enhancements help deliver significant savings when it comes to bandwidth and user satisfaction.

Confirmation management is clearly the future for managing all Apple devices in an organization and the previous MDM framework is obsolete.

It is easy to imagine that framework will be obsolete and unsupported. This has consequences because older OSes (iPadOS, macOS, and tvOS) that are unable to run the appropriate versions that support authentication will eventually need to be replaced. Given Apple ‘s efforts to back up older devices with current software, this may not be an immediate concern. But IT leaders should pay attention.