MDM moves beyond mobile devices into Macs
MobileIron today announced that its mobile device management (MDM) tool now supports the new OS X Mountain Lion operating system for Macs, released on Wednesday. The company cited fast adoption of Macs in business as the reason it moved out of its mobile-only roots (iOS, Android, and some lesser-used mobile OSes). "Forrester Research forecasts that enterprises will spend $19 billion on the Mac and iPad in 2012, with that number increasing to $28 billion in 2013," MobileIron noted. In June, MDM provider AirWatch annoucned similar support for OS X Lion and says Mountain Lion support is due soon.
The management capabilities MobileIron and AirWatch offer IT for OS X are minimum passcode and password requirements, Wi-Fi and VPN configurations, authentication certificates (for users, apps, and devices), email configuration, remote lock and wipe, and removal of enterprise provisioning information when retiring Macs. Although OS X Server provides these same capabilities for Macs and iOS devices, it requires that IT have a separate server than what is used for managing other devices and doesn't provide as much management capability as available in an MDM tool such as MobileIron's or AirWatch's.
MobileIron and AirWatch are not the only company to support both Macs and mobile devices for security management, but they are the first major MDM vendors to do so. Symantec's Altiris and Centrify's Centrify Suite, for example, have recently added Mac and iOS support to their Windows-oriented client management tools, a response to the fact that businesses increasingly are supporting endpoint diversity rather than insisting on a Windows monoculture.
And MobileIron earlier this year developed APIs to let Microsoft System Center 2012 manage mobile devices through MobileIron's server, so Windows admins could manage mobile devices through the familiar System Center console.
That follows a trend of expanding System Center beyond Microsoft's Windows focus led by Quest Software, which offers both OS X and mobile (iOS and Android) add-ons to System Center. (Dell agreed to buy Quest earlier this month, bulking up its system management portfolio, which also includes Kace.) Symantec recently bought Odyssey Software for its System Center add-on for iOS and Android, but it does not support OS X. Meraki offers an MDM tool that can also manage Macs and Windows PCs if you install a client on them.
(Source: infoworld.com)
