How Sessions’s two-person IT team keeps a revenue-critical device fleet running and secure across UK quick service restaurants

The challenge

Sessions scouts single-venue food brands and scales them nationally through a network of kitchens. The point-of-sale and kiosk software that powers those kitchens runs on a customer-facing iPad fleet deployed at venues across the UK. None of those venues has IT on site, and the team that owns the fleet is two people: Andrea Murru, an iOS developer who builds the in-venue app and manages the mobile devices, and his manager Gianluca, the VP of Engineering.

After moving off of another device management tool, the mobile fleet spent about a year without MDM at all. App updates went out manually, with Andrea messaging franchisees a download link venue by venue and trusting it landed. On devices taking live card payments, that gap isn't a minor inconvenience. It means customers can't order, and the kitchen stops making money.

On the Mac fleet, a third-party security assessment made the manual patch gap impossible to ignore. While Sessions is not required to hold security certifications, the assessment flagged basic fleet management functions, such as patching, as a security risk.

The solution

One console for every device class

Sessions already ran its mobile fleet on Iru, so extending coverage to the internal Mac fleet meant consolidating onto a single platform rather than running separate tools for separate device classes. It also had to be operable by people who are not full-time IT, configured once and largely left alone.

As Gianluca puts it, "We were looking for a simple solution that would cover our full estate... a tool that could be used by people who are not that technical on the onboarding side. Iru is simple enough, you set it and forget it."

Iru is simple enough, you set it and forget it.

Gianluca Maccarone
VP of Engineering

A dedicated Iru Blueprint for each device use case

The fleet runs on three Blueprints, one per device use case:

• Point-of-sale devices retain access to Bluetooth settings so they can reconnect a Stripe card reader when needed.

• Customer kiosk iPad devices are locked to the single ordering app, preventing a walk-in customer from navigating device settings.

• Internal Mac devices run on an improved, automated security baseline.

The Blueprint and Assignment Map are amazing, and having this consistency is super helpful to avoid complexity and have better control over our devices.

Andrea Murru 
iOS Developer

Remote fleet management across every kitchen

When Stripe ships a card-reader firmware update, rollouts to iPad devices need to be immediate. A stalled rollout means dropped payments in a kitchen nobody can drive to. Instead of updating kitchens one by one, Iru pushes a single enforced update across the fleet.

As Andrea puts it, "We can release the app and push an enforced update of the app and have it installed in all the devices in less than an hour. It’s a real-time way to manage the system and the apps."

An automated security baseline on Mac

On the Mac fleet, Gianluca applied a CIS-tuned Blueprint as the baseline, enforcing full-disk encryption, firewall, and password standards. Sessions also enabled Vulnerability Response to remediate issues by severity: critical vulnerabilities are forced within a day, while lower-severity findings run on a longer remediation window.

You set it and forget it. The user's life goes on without us basically following up on what they need to do.

Gianluca Maccarone
VP of Engineering

Results

Before Iru, app updates required Andrea to message franchisees one venue at a time and trust the update landed. Now a single enforced push reaches every kitchen in under an hour. On the Mac side, the security baseline that a third-party assessment had flagged as inadequate now runs automatically across every device, without manual follow-up from the team.

When Andrea extended Iru coverage from the mobile fleet to the Mac fleet, there was no new learning curve. The same Blueprint model and workflows were applied, so he piloted it on his own device, rolled it to the tech team, and then to the company. New Mac devices now arrive pre-enrolled through Apple Business Manager, with the only manual step being attaching the device to the right user.

The fleet scales without adding processes.

If we want to move from only having 10 devices to 100,000 devices, it's done in a snap. We are very happy about how that works.

Andrea Murru 
iOS Developer

For a two-person team running hundreds of payment-critical devices they never physically touch, the measure is not the number of devices managed. Its kitchens are staying open. As Andrea puts it, "For us, it's less about managing devices and more about ensuring operations keep running without any friction. Iru helps to achieve that, 100%."

Looking ahead

Sessions in active growth mode, and the device estate is expanding alongside it. As the kitchen network grows and the franchise path to a physical restaurant opens, the device count climbs with every new venue. The team's position is that Iru is the operating layer that makes that growth possible without adding IT headcount or compromising the security baseline already in place. The next priority is keeping the iPad and Mac fleets in lockstep as both scale.

For a team of two managing hundreds of payment-critical devices across a national network of kitchens, what Iru enables is straightforward: the kitchens stay open, and Sessions keeps building.

About Sessions

Sessions is a UK-based hospitality technology startup that incubates and scales food brands through a network of kitchens and quick-service restaurants. The company builds the point-of-sale and kiosk software that powers its kitchen operations and supports franchise expansion into physical venues, managing a mixed device estate of customer-facing iPads and iPhones alongside internal Mac computers across its team and distributed venue network.