Mosyle leads the rise of a new generation of Apple endpoint software

Apple’s growth in the enterprise over the last two decades has been an impressive turnaround when you consider how entrenched Microsoft was in desktop computing for the early part of the 2000s. Did enterprise IT managers love Windows XP, Windows 7, etc.? 

They loved the seamless management a complete solution of Windows Server, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office, and Windows brought to their work-life.

Now companies leveraging Apple devices are gaining access to a next generation of products that bring this concept to a new level, making the management and security of Apple devices a fully unified and automated experience that can’t be matched when using any other devices. 

At the forefront of this movement is Mosyle. Over the past five years, the company grew from a new Apple MDM provider to a leader in the market. Mosyle is responsible for several innovations that have become table stakes for other vendors in the Apple MDM space.

Now, Mosyle is innovating again and introducing the concept of Apple Unified Platform. 

The idea for Mosyle’s Apple Unified Platform is clear. It makes perfect sense when you hear it for the first time: integrating five critical security and management applications into a single Apple-only platform.  

Still, it completely changes how B2B companies providing endpoint solutions position themselves.

Until now, companies usually position themselves on one of the traditional “Unified” categories, such as “Unified Endpoint Management” or “Unified Endpoint Security.” Those categories are well known for their quadrants and industry recognition.

The angle for these traditional B2B market segments is the specialization of an application category (e.g., mobile device management) and the generalization of the platform (macOS, iOS, Android, Windows, Linux and others).

So, a vendor in the traditional Unified Endpoint Management market would provide MDM functionality for all platforms. A customer would then need several unified solutions to cover their devices’ needs, as security, identity, patch management and others.

The problem with that? Lack of specialization and increased complexity.

The growing differences between operating systems, proactively created by companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google to differentiate themselves from competitors, are making it virtually impossible for multi-platform providers to offer a good experience, coverage and performance on each platform. Instead, they are forced to focus on the common points between operating systems while the platform providers simultaneously eliminate these common elements.

Mosyle’s Apple Unified Platform is exactly the opposite. 

Mosyle’s specialization happens on the operating system (in this case, Apple), and the offer is extended to different solution needs, including MDM, endpoint security, identity management, content filtering and more. This new approach allows companies to use a single solution for all their Apple devices’ needs while reducing the number of providers they need to cover their entire fleet.

A company using only Apple devices can solve all its needs with a single and integrated platform. And in the worst case, even if they are agnostic and let employees use any platform, they would end up with no more than three providers – it’s a game-changer.

Mosyle currently offers this concept through a product called Mosyle Fuse that delivers the following capabilities:

• Enterprise-grade mobile device management;
• Identity Management;
• Automated patch management;
• Endpoint security, including device hardening and compliance, next-generation antivirus and privilege management; and
• Online privacy and security through encrypted DNS-based content filtering. 

In addition to allowing customers to use a single solution for all their Apple device needs (literally), this concept also brings several other benefits:

1. Complete feature set due to OS specialization. A company focusing on a single platform such as Mosyle for Apple devices can dramatically increase specialization on one operating system provider, reaching a level of quality and efficiency that’s unmatchable for multi-platforms providers. For specialized Apple providers, there are no other platforms than macOS, iOS, iPadOS and tvOS and this makes a huge difference when designing and developing new products and features. With no exception, they are more powerful and perform much better. 

2.  Allows for total automation. IT administrators know how challenging it is to deploy multiple isolated solutions on endpoints and ensure they are working as expected on all company devices. These solutions are designed to be deployed and used independently of any other vendor solution. The side effect: they don’t work well with other vendor products. If you have ever tried to deploy an endpoint security solution to a fleet of hundreds or thousands of Macs, you understand this problem. Several steps must be performed, from installing an app (that normally is not available at Apple’s App Store), configuring a system extension, sending app configurations so the app is connected with the company account without relying on employee manual login, and more.

And if multiple steps are not enough, they need to be performed in a specific order and remotely. In the best case, 80% of devices will work. And when a new update is available, you must do it all again. Mosyle’s Apple Unified Platform concept simply eliminates all of that. An employee boots up a brand-new device for the first time, and it all happens automatically. The device is configured, apps installed, endpoint security and content filtering automatically enforced, and no one must do anything. It just works because Mosyle is using its own MDM to natively enforce the content filtering, endpoint security and much more.

3. Better performance due to native integration. All endpoint software has one thing in common: it runs on the same device. However, most of the software is designed to ignore this fact, which has several implications. First, different pieces of endpoint software generally impact each other. It’s common for web filtering solutions to block the online traffic of the MDM or the EDR, or for the EDR to quarantine the MDM agent or the web filtering solution by mistake.

When that happens, they all stop working, and the IT team must perform a lot of manual work to fix the devices (until it happens again). Second, they don’t leverage the information from the other solutions. The MDM knows what is expected to run on each device because it deployed and configured the device. The web filtering solution has full visibility of web traffic but has no idea what connection comes from malware. And the EDR can’t leverage the info coming from the MDM and the web filtering to make better and quicker detections. Having them all designed to work together and leverage each other unleashes amazing possibilities. When this happens, one solution won’t only avoid impacting the other, but help them. This is mind blowing.

4. Better cost. Mosyle also shows that an Apple Unified Platform can be extremely affordable and cost less than one of the five single independent solutions it replaces currently. 

The potential of the new Apple Unified Platform is unbelievable, and based on Mosyle’s shared information, customers are rapidly embracing it. Since Mosyle first introduced this concept with Mosyle Fuse a little more than one year ago, over 70% of all new customers opted for Mosyle Fuse rather than its MDM-only product.

With these kinds of results, it’s clear there’s no way back to a strategy of isolated and independent multi-platform solutions struggling to work together.

Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news: