How Prima's 10-person IT team saves about 10 hours every onboarding Monday with Iru

The challenge

Prima Assicurazioni is an insurance technology company, headquartered in Milan, that sits between insurance carriers and customers, replacing a legacy, paper-heavy buying process with a fast digital one. In the last four years the company has expanded into the UK and Spain, and its 10-person IT team supports everyone from customer care specialists and pricing experts to the engineering team that builds the product itself.

Jorge Cedeno, Engineering Manager, has been at Prima since 2018, long enough to remember when employees worked on fixed desktop workstations. The pandemic pushed the company toward laptops and a catalog of devices matched to each role, and the engineering team, Prima's biggest group of Mac users, grew far beyond the 16 software engineers whose machines were once managed locally.

The team had experience with other MDMs and knew the larger platforms could do whatever Prima needed. But learning one of them was a project in itself, and this was the first time Prima had deployed device management for its Macs. The team wanted something it could pick up quickly.

The solution

Choosing simple on purpose

One of Prima's stated company values is “we simplify complicated things,” and the IT team applies it to its own tooling as deliberately as it does to the business. The ticketing system isn't the industry heavyweight. The old on-premises Windows server was retired in favor of cloud management from day one. And when it came to the Mac fleet, the team chose Iru (then Kandji) in 2021 because it was easy to learn.

The choice paid off immediately in how quickly people could become productive on it. Ryan Lemus, who manages Prima's Windows and Mac fleets, joined two years ago from a company where he had managed Macs on a different MDM.

For Jorge, simplicity isn't about doing less. It is about not creating work for the team that doesn't need to exist, so the hours go toward problems that matter.

Auto Apps replaced packaging and calendar reminders

At his previous company, Ryan packaged applications by hand and set calendar reminders to check for new versions every two or three weeks. At Prima, Auto Apps handle it.

The team uses all three Auto Apps install modes, and found a specific job for “upgrade only.” Prima runs a vulnerability scanner across its laptops, and it sometimes flags a tool used by just two people. There's no reason to make that app available to the whole fleet, so Ryan sets it to upgrade only: anyone who already has it gets patched, and nobody else sees it.

Assignment Maps deliver the right config to each department

Ryan migrated Prima's static Blueprints to Assignment Maps as soon as Iru announced that classic blueprints would be deprecated. The conditional blocks let the team deploy only what a given department needs, and the Okta integration supplies the department information to target them.

Prima is a Google-based company, so Chrome is the only approved browser, and only one VPN is sanctioned. Assignment Maps let the team block the alternatives for most users while security-approved exceptions, such as developers testing in other browsers, get what they need.

A platform that grew alongside the company

Prima chose Iru in 2021 without anticipating the regulatory requirements, international launches, and audits that growth would bring. What Jorge noticed is that Iru kept adding what the team needed before the team had to go looking for it.

When Prima moved all three operating systems to single sign-on through one identity provider, and the security team then needed to authenticate through a second one, Passport was there. When the team wanted to tighten permissions for standard users and let them request elevated access, the privilege escalation feature was already available.

Results

Jorge measures return on investment in time, and onboarding is where it shows up first. On a typical Monday the team might prepare 10 MacBooks, and he estimates Iru saves roughly an hour on each, about 10 hours in a day, on onboarding alone. Because setup is automated, the team now ships devices directly to remote users rather than staging them in the office first.

The same orchestration cuts support volume. Every new hire gets the right applications automatically, so tickets about missing software have fallen away.

It also changes how the team responds when security asks for something. During an active industry incident, the security team sent daily requests, and IT could commit to a same-day turnaround across the fleet, with clear data on any device that didn't comply.

Because Iru was easy to learn, it was easy to document, and the whole team can act on it. Routine changes don't wait for Ryan.

Looking ahead

Prima's next Iru project builds on the Assignment Maps work: restricting specific applications by department using conditional blocks and the existing Okta groups. The team plans every rollout the same way it plans everything else, forecasting the problems a change might create, mitigating them, and then deploying to the full fleet, with the goal of staying proactive rather than reactive.

Jorge is candid that there is always room for improvement, and the team submits feature requests when it finds a gap. So far, the pattern has held: the features Prima needs have tended to arrive as the need does. As the company continues to grow across three countries, the IT team expects its tooling to keep growing with it, without adding complexity it would then have to manage.

About Prima Assicurazioni

Prima Assicurazioni is a Milan-based insurtech founded in 2015 that makes buying insurance simpler, faster, and more affordable by connecting customers with carriers through a digital-first experience. Operating in Italy, the UK, and Spain, Prima serves millions of customers and continues to expand across Europe.