The Iru Blog

Iru Team

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11 min read

Guide for Apple IT: Apple Business Manager

Apple Business Manager is a critical tool for anyone who manages Apple devices. It provides a critical link between your Apple device management solution and your devices, enabling things like Automated Device Enrollment (ADE). Add in its utility in distributing apps and other content at scale and other content and its ability to federate with user directories, and Apple Business Manager clearly becomes essential for any Mac admin.

Educational February 14, 2023

Iru Team

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7 min read

Guide for Apple IT: Managed Apple Accounts

Managed Apple Accounts are Apple Accounts (formerly Apple IDs) that your organization owns, controls, and assigns to users. Like any Apple Account, Managed Apple Accounts can be used to sign in to devices and services.

Educational February 10, 2023

Iru Team

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6 min read

Zero Trust Security: What Mac Admins Need to Know

Back in the day, organizational security was built around the idea of a firewall: The security system blocked access to resources within the organization from external bad actors. Originally, that paradigm was literal: You established a perimeter and kept people from outside the building from accessing the network—and the resources attached to it—inside.

Educational February 2, 2023

Iru Team

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5 min read

Guide for Apple IT: Managing FileVault

Securing sensitive company data is one of the top priorities for any IT department. For businesses that run on Apple, FileVault is an essential tool for Mac security. By encrypting all of the information on a Mac computer’s startup disk, FileVault makes company information unreadable to unauthorized users.

Educational January 31, 2023

Alexandre Morin

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7 min read

Reasons to Use Apple Business Manager

Apple Business Manager is a free service provided by Apple that allows organizations to manage three things: devices, apps, and accounts.

Educational January 27, 2023

Alexandre Morin

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4 min read

Apple Device Supervision: What It Does, How to Implement It

If you manage Apple devices, "supervision" is one of the most important concepts you need to understand. It's often confused with management, but the two terms do not mean the same thing. In this article, you'll learn what supervision is, how it works, and what you need to know about it when managing Apple devices.

Educational January 13, 2023

Iru Team

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7 min read

Mac Malware Persistence: What It Is, How It's Achieved

When it comes to Mac malware, IT and security staff are well aware of the most common infection vectors: malicious emails or attachments, Trojanized applications, or attackers leveraging both known and unknown exploits. Apple consistently retools each version of its operating system to include better intrinsic defenses against such threats.

Educational January 6, 2023

Steven Vogt

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10 min read

802.1X Enterprise Wi-Fi Authentication: What Mac Admins Need to Know

Most people—even some admins—don’t think twice about logging into the office Wi-Fi network. Typically, they just supply a username and password, their Apple devices log in, and they never think about what just happened. But there’s a lot going on under the hood to make that authentication work. There are a bewildering variety of authentication protocols—each with its own acronym, of course—enabling enterprise Wi-Fi. As someone who manages Apple devices in the enterprise, it’s typically up to you to make sure those wireless connections happen. So here’s what you need to know about enterprise authentication and how it works.

Educational December 6, 2022

Patrick Gallagher

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10 min read

How to Plan a Large-Scale Deployment of Apple Devices

A few months ago, we told you about how you—as an IT admin in the enterprise—can think about the mass deployment of Apple devices. Our main point then: When it comes to deploying hundreds or thousands of Apple devices at a time, enterprise admins have a lot to learn from their colleagues in education, who do it every year.

Educational November 15, 2022

Iru Team

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8 min read

Guide for Apple IT: Mercenary Spyware and Lockdown Mode

Although Apple designs security into its hardware, software, and services, Apple devices are not immune to malware and unwanted software installation. According to Malwarebytes’ 2022 Threat Review, the vast majority of malware detections on Apple platforms are—in most cases—fairly harmless; however, the growth of mercenary spyware places specific, targeted individuals within key industries at risk.

Educational September 30, 2022

Emalee Firestein

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10 min read

Mac Troubleshooting: Our Top Tips

At some point in your IT career, you’ve no doubt spent a good chunk of your time stationed on the help desk, fielding questions from users and helping them troubleshoot their Mac computers. During that Mac troubleshooting, you’ve probably compiled a list of their most common problems, along with your suggested solutions.

Educational September 23, 2022

Patrick Gallagher

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7 min read

Deploying Apple Devices: What Enterprises Can Learn from Education

When you think of mass deployments of Apple devices, you might typically think of schools. IT admins who work in education know all about deploying hundreds, if not thousands, of devices at once and what that requires because they do it every year. They know it’s no trivial task. While they might try to make the process seem simple to the outside world, the truth is that it takes an incredible amount of planning and preparation to deploy thousands of devices at once.

Thought Leadership June 3, 2022

Caleb Basinger

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6 min read

What the Mac Has Learned About Security from iPhone and iPad

Mac users have long enjoyed the platform’s open approach to computing. There was an exposed file system, no limitations on how many apps you could run at once, and scripts that took action when triggered by events. The only barrier to doing whatever you wanted was when the OS crashed or became unusable. The openness of the platform gave users and IT administrators alike plenty of flexibility. Then iOS came along. Because Apple was able to start fresh with iPhone OS (before it became iOS), because the mobile operating system was built from the ground up and didn’t have to worry about backward compatibility, the company was able to build a security model into iPhone and iPad devices that was forward-looking and designed for an environment in which connectivity was constant and security threats were pervasive.

Thought Leadership May 20, 2022

Matt Wilson

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8 min read

APIs and Apple Device Management: A Guide for Mac Admins

Application programming interfaces—better known as APIs—make it possible for one service to talk to another without needing to know how the other one works. They create a common language that disparate services can use to communicate. As such, they’re the key to automating device management workflows. If you’re an Apple IT administrator, you’re using APIs all the time (even if you don’t know it), and so you need to know how they work. Here’s a high-level overview.

Educational May 13, 2022

Alexandre Morin

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4 min read

How to Troubleshoot Apple Business Manager

Maybe a batch of new iPhone devices you just bought aren’t showing up in Apple Business Manager. Or licenses you recently purchased from Apps and Books can’t be found in your device management solution. Or even worse, perhaps your Apple fleet is no longer responding to MDM commands.

Educational May 10, 2022