Choosing between Apple and not Apple isn’t always easy, but if you’re the proud mother of a bouncing baby fleet of Apple devices, choosing Apple Business Manager (ABM) to support your fleet is the best choice. Maybe it’s because those charitable folks at Apple give it away free. Whoop! That’s a big win for your IT budget.
But Don’t Get Too Excited
However, not everything in life is free; you can’t take advantage of all the features of ABM without a separate Mobile Device Management (MDM) application. Consider ABM as a link between your devices, your MDM, and the applications and policies that your MDM platform enforces on your devices.
The most important thing to remember is that your best MDM is the one that does what you need it to do. It’s not-quite-but-nearly the same as buying an auto: when you’re going through your first mid-life crisis, you’ll need to pile the kids into a sensible, economic warhorse with a roomy trunk. You’ll get a banana-yellow two-seater powered by a rocket launcher when you're having your second mid-life crisis.
Apple Mobile Device Management Costs and Extras
So, what kind of costs and add-ons are we looking at? Let’s build a fantasy system and stop when our accountant screams quietly into their fist. Here’s the shopping list:
1. MDM Platform
MDM platforms can be feature-rich (or not), high capability (or not), with several pricing tiers (or not), depending on how fancy they are. They’re usually licensed monthly or annually, on a per-device or per-user basis (and sometimes a per-technician basis). If you have more devices than people, a per-user basis is more cost-effective. And if you have a high volume of devices, you may get lucky and get a discount.
And, of course, pricing will also depend on which features you want and/or need. Although data protection should be a priority for all organizations, you might operate in a more regulated environment, or store highly sensitive data, and will need a greater degree of control and security. And this means more features, and more expense.
Most MDM platforms (at the moment) cost between $3 to $7 per device, per month. Some of the cheaper ones are just as good as the pricier ones (but not always). You can undoubtedly find bargain-bucket MDM platforms for around $2 per device per month, but these are usually light on features and are only appropriate for the smallest micro-firms with no compliance needs.
2. Automated Patch Management
You’ll save time and enjoy Zen-like peace of mind if you buy into an MDM platform that sensibly offers patch management. However, even the most advanced MDM platforms can’t perform that final patching step: restarting your employees’ computers to install the patches.
In pre-laptop days, when office workers made that delightful daily commute to their home-away-from-home, it was easy for IT to reboot all the computers at three in the morning when even the most determined C-suiter was snoozing on the carpet. But now it’s different. Your team’s laptops commute between home and beach and toddler birthday parties, so you can’t predict when a computer will be in use—or even turned on—for a satisfying reboot. You’ll need to keep a constant eye on which laptops have yet to install the patches, and you’ll have to nag, cajole, wheedle, and threaten those employees that, if they don’t restart soon, they’re off your gender reveal party list forever. This thankless, never-ending task will collide with your job satisfaction score, so make someone else miserable by hiring a consultant to keep an eye on the reboots for you (ahem, that’s us, and we nag like we enjoy it).
3. Security Integrations
Because you’re a grown-up who takes data security and compliance seriously, you’ll probably want to toss a few security integrations into your shopping basket. There’s a chocolate box of choices, but the bonbons you’ll want to chug down first are a behavior-based anti-virus platform like SentinelOne, and DNS protection that supports DoH, such as Cisco Umbrella. These are likely to add more bucks per endpoint to your monthly bill.
4. Tech Support
Cyber-gurus tells us that one day technology will be seamless, but, in the meantime, things will definitely go wrong. If you need to support your mobile team when they have IT issues, your techie will need remote access to the fleet devices for a spot of troubleshooting. Confusing over-the-phone explanations are redundant now that TeamViewer can show your techies the app blips, user silliness, and device weirdness for themselves.
5. Asset Management
Now that your MDM is in place, your auditor is relieved that you finally have a workable asset inventory. However, you may want to supplement its feature set with enriched data such as warranty status and health monitoring add-ons. Or even some oh-crap-you’ve-definitely-got-to-haves like app installation software and security setting managers.
You could view this Frankenstein you’ve created in a single dashboard in an ideal world. Luckily, we live in an ideal world (at least in this context) because one of our favorite things is to wrangle our clients’ stuff into a bespoke dashboard of enriched inventory data. We call it the Fleet Sheet.
6. Backups
Oops, and then some. The stuff has hit the fan, and there’s an outage of Something Very Important. But you can afford to be smug when everyone else is losing it because you’ve plumped for some extra clever backup—for your laptops and SaaS applications. Maybe there’s a question of data sovereignty, and you need your data to sit in a specific geographic location. It’s all doable with services such as Code42, though it does add a few bucks per device per month to the bill.
How to Make Sense of It All
We help our clients keep costs and risks down by chatting through Apple mobile device management costs and benefits, and what they need (and don’t need). If this sounds useful to you, give us a call. We’re here to help!