The Iru Blog

Iru Team

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5 min read

To Improve IT Efficiency, Consider New KPIs

How efficient is your IT team? Historically, that’s been a straightforward question, with an equally straightforward answer: You look at the number of help-desk tickets they receive in a given time period, count the number that were solved, calculate the ratio of tickets solved to tickets received, and—voila! You have a metric.

Thought Leadership April 23, 2024

Devin Byrd

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5 min read

What Mac Security Researchers Actually Do

The biggest challenge faced by Mac security researchers today: Too many people still subscribe to the idea that Mac systems are impervious to security threats. That was the top takeaway from a conversation I recently had with two of those security pros: Tony Piazza, purple team lead and offensive security engineer at Nvidia, and Christopher Lopez, senior researcher at Iru. We talked about how they got to where they are in their careers, how they spend their workdays now, and how they try to tell the world a more realistic story about Mac security.

Thought Leadership November 21, 2023

Iru Team

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5 min read

Four Signs It's Time to Switch MDM Solutions

It isn’t that difficult to know when you need to change your current MDM solution. The most prominent sign? You dread making any changes—small or large—to the macOS, iOS, iPadOS, or tvOS devices you’re managing.

Thought Leadership October 13, 2023

Iru Team

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4 min read

Why Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) Matters

As director of security and compliance at Neural Payments, David Patrick knows he can’t be complacent about the Apple endpoints in his care. “Previously, we could just say, ‘It's an Apple device, there is no malware.’ That just isn't sufficient anymore.”

Thought Leadership August 8, 2023

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

Steven Vogt

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6 min read

The Great Debate: Should You Set Up Users as Admin or Standard?

What kind of accounts should you create when you provision Mac computers for your users: admin or standard? It’s an age-old question in Apple IT. It’s an argument that pulls on many threads, including user convenience, IT workloads, and organizational security. And it has no easy, one-size-fits-all solution, which is why it’s been around so long. To dig into that argument a bit and tease out some of those threads, we chatted recently with Rich Trouton. Rich has been doing Mac and server administration for over 20 years, in a variety of environments from higher ed and government to advertising and software development. He’s currently at SAP, where he supports that company’s Apple community. Rich has also written extensively about managing Apple devices for Peachpit, Apress, and MacTech Magazine; his most recent book with co-author Charles Edge is Apple Device Management: A Unified Theory of Managing Macs, iPads, iPhones, and Apple TVs. He was also instrumental in bringing the SAP Privileges app—which addresses many of the concerns discussed below—to the Mac admin community. Here’s a recap of that conversation. Check out the entire presentation here.

Thought Leadership April 29, 2022

Iru Team

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5 min read

Why IT Should Be Transparent with Users

Let’s be honest: Sometimes there’s a trust gap between IT and end-users. Admins may promulgate a policy without explaining the “why” behind it. Users may then try to circumvent or disregard that policy. And back and forth it goes, making life harder for both sides. Transparency in IT—telling users what you’re doing and why—is one way to bridge that gap. But how much should you, as an admin, tell your users about how you’re managing their devices? What’s the best way to communicate that to them?

Thought Leadership December 22, 2021

Iru Team

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3 min read

How Mac Admins Make Zero-Touch Deployments Work

The ideal: You have a new Mac, iPhone, or iPad shipped directly to a new employee and, when that employee starts it up for the first time, the device is automatically enrolled in your MDM solution, with all the apps and settings you want in place—all without you ever touching the hardware itself. But a lot of things have to work right for zero-touch deployments to go as smoothly as you’d like. Among the variables: The vendor you’re buying the hardware from; Apple’s enterprise services (in the form of Automated Device Enrollment via Apple Business Manager or Apple School Manager); your organization’s IT infrastructure; and users themselves. A problem with any one of those links in the chain can make zero-touch harder than it should be. That’s why we recently asked IT administrators on LinkedIn about their experiences with zero-touch. They had some advice for those who are following in their footsteps. Here’s what they told us.

Thought Leadership May 6, 2021

Iru Team

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7 min read

The Case for MDM: Improve Security, Save Money

In the modern workplace, mobile device management (MDM) is essential. When it comes to configuring devices, deploying apps, and complying with security requirements, MDM solutions can help you do it all quickly, flexibly, and cost-effectively. But despite all those advantages, the value of MDM can sometimes be a hard thing for an organization's decision-makers to appreciate. They may not know what MDM is or how it can make an IT team more efficient and freed up for more important strategic work. In this guide, we’ll spell out what we consider to be the most compelling reasons for adopting MDM. We’ll focus primarily on MDM solutions that can help you manage Mac computers and iPhone/iPad devices, because that’s the business we know best. The essentials of the case we'd make: What is MDM? Why do you need MDM? Improving security Saving time Increasing agility Saving money

Thought Leadership March 25, 2021