Managing the Rise of Apple Systems in Business – Weldon Dodd, Kandji

This is Textron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with Weldon Dodd, who's senior vice President for Community for Kanji, and we're talking about a new study they have about, well, just how much usage of Apple devices are there in the enterprise, and are people happy with that?

And maybe there's some additional costs that we don't know about. Hey, Weldon, welcome to the show. Hey, Michael, thanks for having me on.

Yeah, the, the, the survey was pretty interesting and puts Apple in a pretty good light. Well, in that regard, is it surprising, 'cause we have seen a lot more of Apple devices in the enterprise and in businesses, but what's your sense of, are they half of all devices now? I mean, I can remember a time when they were barely 5%, but has this become more standard issue equipment?

Yeah, it, it, I think, uh, it's changed a lot over the last several years. Right. I remember those days too, when people were talking about maybe four or 5% of the market.

Um, and Apple's consistently been one of the computer manufacturers where their share of the market has continued to grow over the last decade. While a lot of PC manufacturers, their share is declining. And so I, you know, I don't know where we land overall, but like there is data here that when employees are offered a choice about which device they would like to have, it seems to be about a 50 50 split.

And there's some other data coming out of some large companies like Cisco, for example, that show about 25%, 24, 20 5% of people that are currently using Windows are interested in switching to a Mac on their next refresh cycle. So it feels like that percentage could continue to increase. Is it your sense that IT teams have gotten better at managing Macintosh and Apple devices alongside various Windows devices and they've absorbed that cost?

Or are they still struggling with that as an issue? And where do we go from here? I think it's definitely gotten better.

Apple's done a really good job of continuing to develop their mobile device management protocol, which started with iPhone and and iPad, but has extended to the Mac, and that has provided a framework for IT teams to manage these devices a bit more cohesively. There's that, I think also just there's a larger trend towards using cloud services, uh, remote work or hybrid workers where being in the office and having a device that's connected directly to the corporate network is less important than it used to be, and that has provided enough flexibility for IT teams to be able to support other platforms like Apple. Is there also a lot of default activity around the notion of, well, people are working from home and when they do that, they kind of pick their own devices and so a lot of the choices are being made not necessarily by IT people, but by individuals who have, uh, shall we say, a lot more autonomy these days?

Yeah. One of the results in this survey was that 67% of the respondents say that employee productivity has increased with the use of Apple devices. And it's a, it's a little bit hard to, you know, put your finger exactly on what that increase is from, or what the, the cause of that increase in productivity is.

But certainly some of the factors to consider are, if an employee is more familiar with the Apple platform, having the opportunity to use that at work as well just means naturally that they have to spend less time learning a different platform or using tools that they're unfamiliar with before they come to their new role. Um, and there's probably some other factors in there too. Like one of the findings out of some large enterprises was that there were fewer, uh, security incidents around malware and viruses with Mac, they, the users of Mac Gen tend to generate fewer help desk tickets than their counterparts that are using Windows.

Their satisfaction with IT support is higher. There's some other evidence there that is around productivity that suggests that people just have a good experience, uh, when they choose to use an Apple device at work. Were there any patterns around say, age or gender in terms of who prefers to use Apple devices versus Windows?

You know, this survey that we, um, that was done recently doesn't have a lot of strong evidence there around, um, you know, age groups or generational gaps. Uh, I think anecdotally, right, we understand that a lot of, um, young people going through college and leaving university have maybe used a Mac through through their career, and certainly they've been using web-based tools through that whole period. So when they enter the workforce, you know, there's, um, a less strong preference for particular desktop applications that are tied to a specific platform.

And so I think that's created more flexibility for people that are entering the workforce and allows them to choose a device and still be successful, still be productive. Of course, there's a lot of people building custom applications out there and they have to run on both Windows and Apple usually. Are there nuances in those different environments that, um, show up in a way that end users see?

Or, um, can we seamlessly collaborate across applications regardless of platform? Um, I mean, certainly situation is, I think, better than it's ever been in terms of cross-platform collaboration tools. If, uh, most organizations, I think it's fair to say, use either the Office Productivity Suite or Google Workspace and functionality across both of those, uh, across both Windows and Mac and Android and, and iPhone, iPad are pretty equivalent.

And so I think that's opened up quite a bit. Now, there's another element to this though, where employees that have a choice program and they choose to use a MAC at work, there's a reason that they did that. There's something they like about the platform.

There's things that they're used to, things that they find help them to be productive. And so sometimes what we see is tools that try to impose a, like a Windows approach on the Mac platform aren't very successful. So sometimes, for instance, like, uh, virtual desktop infrastructure has been an enormous boon for a lot of IT teams to be able to, uh, efficiently provide a, a working environment and productivity applications.

But if that V D I environment goes into Windows, well then some of those productivity gains are lost. Um, it's an unfamiliar interface, moving files back and forth between the local environment and the V D I environment. Even simple things like printing right can be a struggle.

So there is a good reason to provide native applications that one operate in a way that feels familiar to users, but two, like take advantage of all of the other platform features that the employee maybe had in mind when they chose Apple as their preferred device to use. Um, my, my company makes device management software for Apple devices, and we see this even within the role of providing tools to IT teams that there's an advantage in having tools that support the native platform and work in a native way and provide a native experience to the end user, um, as well as the benefits to the IT team that it's up to date, it's available, for instance, um, macOS Sonoma is just available today actually, as we're doing this recording and our tools are ready to work with that latest release on the day that it's released. And that provides a, an advantage to the IT team as well.

Are IT teams using tools for each platform natively to manage it, whether it's Apple or Windows, or are they trying to use one tool to manage both platforms and what are the trade offs in those approaches? Yeah, there's definitely, um, two different camps, right? There's, um, you know, u e m sort of that universal endpoint management approach where it's all platforms in one tool, and then, uh, there's a different camp where it's different tools for each platform.

And I think there, there are pros and cons to each one. One of the disadvantages with, uh, uh, the u e M approach is that you might have to design the feature set to the lowest common denominator across the different platforms. And so that might prevent an IT team from taking advantage of some of the particular features of a platform that users really enjoy.

And on, on the other side, right? Some of the downsides could be, well, those tools don't talk to each other. If you're trying to implement a policy for, let's say, security across both Windows and Mac, you have to implement that policy twice.

Um, in my own experience, I, I, I definitely have a bias towards that ladder camp of having tools that are specific to each platform. Some of that's born from my experience running network management systems for cell phone carriers back in the nineties. And we saw a ton of value in bringing all these disparate networking devices from Cisco, Juniper, Nortel at and t course switches together, but the, the management of those devices was different enough that we were successful having different teams that specialized in each platform.

And then we saw a lot of value in aggregating to telemetry data, aggregating alarms and logs together so that we could do correlation across the network from all these different devices. And I see a very similar situation today with endpoint management, where there's a real distinct advantage in having tools to manage each platform in the way that it's meant to be managed. And, but still having that ability to aggregate logs and telemetry and alarms from different platforms together so that you can do that kind of correlation around, hey, there's a security incident, um, uh, an attacker is using this device or this other service to jump off into other endpoints.

And because we can see the whole network cloud services, cloud identity endpoints, networks and so on, that we can start to identify where this attacker's coming in and what they're doing so that we can shut down their access and respond to that incident. It used to be, anyway, I don't know if it's still true, but there used to be a little more esprit de core among the Apple end users where they would support each other more aggressively than you might have seen in a Windows environment where there's a tendency to just tell everybody to call it. Um, is that still going on and, you know, is that just part of the, the joy of the platform or is that kind of a hidden productivity cost because then users are trying to support each other?

Yeah, that's an interesting perspective there. There definitely is still that sense of community within Mac users and Apple admins. So there's a, a, a very, um, uh, well loved and used Slack instance for Mac admins, the Mac admins Slack that's provided for free, and there's tens of thousands of Mac admins that use that resource and talk to each other and help each other.

And that sort of community around, um, supporting Apple devices at work or in the enterprise. I, I haven't really seen the equivalent in other areas of technology when, uh, if that was back in the days when I was doing network management systems or the time I was working at Microsoft or the time I was working at Apple and, and now at Kanji, I really feel like that Apple community is, uh, different than what I've experienced elsewhere. It's very tight knit, it's very welcoming and generous.

Lots of sharing of information in the way that you're talking about end users as well, that it also exists within the admin community. It is a great strength, right, that people can go to the community and get answers and get help. Um, and, uh, it's interesting to consider the idea that maybe that sometimes that works against, um, it in the sense that they're trying to help each other instead of taking the issues to it.

But I, I think most IT professionals would agree like, Hey, if it gets to the answer sooner, it gets to the answer as quickly as possible, then that's a good thing. You can't walk down the street without somebody coming and telling you about their great new AI thing. So do you think AI will get applied to device management and what might that look like?

Yeah, it's already happening. Um, there's several products within this space have offered, um, AI as a way to generate scripts that run on the endpoint. So I think that was one of the early use cases where the, some of these tools like chat G P T are pretty decent at generating a, a shell script or a Python script and, you know, they're pretty good.

You might have to do a little bit of cleanup, but they're, they're pretty decent. Um, I'm a little cautious about that application because I, I'm not comfortable yet with taking a script that was generated by AI and pushing that into production directly on the endpoints that, that I would manage without those steps of review and verification and validation. What, what I am excited about is AI's really good at anomaly detection, dealing with large volumes of data and seeing patterns and seeing exceptions to those patterns.

And so I think there's tons of opportunity here to use that against endpoint information or endpoint telemetry to say that this is normal behavior or this is typical behavior and this is anomalous behavior. I think that will be a real help in detecting security threats and seeing something that, um, you know, for instance, you see a process that's creating a bunch of files and renaming them and moving them into protected places. Um, that doesn't, that's not something a normal application would do.

And then if you look at the, um, network traffic, like if it's accessing a bunch of systems, if it's downloading a whole bunch of files and encrypting them or zipping them, things like that, again, that's anomalous behavior that may indicate there's some kind of attack going on. One other area that I'm interested in is in providing help desk support. So we've seen some early experiments already with just better access to the support article repository.

You know, ask a question in the chat bot, we'll go and find the article that matches what you're talking about that, that's great. Um, but there's some other uses that could come too, where, for example, you detect on an endpoint that this certain application has crashed three times in the last three days. Well, the AI could see that and then suggest, well, maybe the application should be reinstalled in order to resolve this issue.

Well, instead of generating a ticket for the IT team to schedule a time to reinstall the application to do that, maybe the tools could do that automatically, or it could suggest directly to the end user some steps they could take that might resolve this issue. And so with, with the goal really of just reducing the time to resolution and automating some of these normal steps that it would go through to help the end user. So I'm, uh, again, a little cautious about some of the early, uh, steps that we have here, like generating a script and pushing it directly into production.

But I'm excited about the other possibilities where AI can assist it and help, uh, make them more efficient and reduce the time to take care of a user or resolve an issue. What's your sense of the relative security of the two platforms? 'cause that's always a pressing issue these days, and there was a time there where, you know, apple was saying, you know, we don't get viruses, et cetera, et cetera.

I don't know if that's entirely true these days, but, um, relatively in terms of merit, is there an argument to be made for one platform versus the other based on the security level? I, I think there is, but I'll, I'll, um, qualify that statement in in just a moment. But off the top, um, you know, one of the details from Cisco's report was that within their user base, which is over a hundred thousand people, um, using mac, there's, uh, Mac user, Mac users experience five times fewer cyber threats and nine times fewer virus issues than their counterparts of their coworkers on, on PCs.

Um, another detail is, you know, close to 90% of Apple device users employ the biometric verification to log in compared to about 30% on pc. So those are some specific things that suggest that, uh, security on, on Apple devices is, is better. Um, these things do help, you know, fewer viruses, fewer, fewer security, uh, threats, more use of biometric verification, definitely help with security.

But here's the, here's the caveat or the qualifier, because Apple is a popular platform in the enterprise and is growing, it will increasingly be the target of sophisticated cyber attacks. Um, with the three CX supply chain incident earlier this year, there was a specific MAC OSS payload as part of that as attack. So we can see, you know, these large organized, involved sophisticated attacks are targeting Apple platforms.

There's, uh, a lot of built-in security from Apple, so I wanna give them full credit for the steps they've taken to make the platform more secure. The operating system itself is on a separate signed and sealed encrypted volume, so it's really hard to manipulate the operating system software and inject, um, tools that would allow access to secure information. There's a lot of good things that are happening, but at the enterprise, when you're dealing with scale, you still need to employ tools that allow you to get visibility across your entire fleet of what's happening on those devices.

So you, you can do more of that security, uh, threat detection across a large number of devices. So, um, there's work to be done, I think, for IT teams to make sure that their Apple estate or their Apple fleet continues to be secure. All right, folks.

Well, as usual, it kind of comes down to personal preference, but we aren't getting better at managing both environments. I'm afraid. You know, for those of you who are old enough to remember those, uh, taste great less filling arguments that used to happen on television, it's kind of similar to that.

But as we say, the happier somebody is with the system they have, the more productive they're gonna be. So let 'em have what they want. Hey, willin, thanks for being on the show.

Thank you, Michael. Great to be here. All right, back to you guys in the studio.