In a 2019 government security discussion, NASA IT admins Josh Harvey and Allen Golbig joined a room full of fellow IT professionals to share their knowledge around securing and managing Apple devices in a government agency.
While Golbig’s team sets the security baseline requirements for all of NASA, Harvey’s team — at the time of this interview, was managing NASA’s Jamf instances which consisted of around 4,000 of which were at his center and 10,000 macOS devices agency-wide.
According to Golbig, the story Fletcher Previn shared at the 2015 Jamf Nation User Conference (JNUC) about offering IBM employees device choices helped kicked off the conversation of extending NASA’s Apple selection. At the time, many NASA researchers and executives had expressed a preference for macOS, and NASA was determined to provide employees the devices that worked best for them. Golbig said they collaborated with Apple and Jamf Professional Services to ensure a successful pilot program that would meet their security needs and standards…
At the end of the day, Golbig realizes that not every organization has the complexities of NASA’s environment. But, Golbig noted, all organizations that use Apple devices have one big thing in common — the need for an MDM. “If you don’t have a user-approved MDM, your users will suffer,” he said.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, even government agencies can upgrade to using Apple Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and more!
See also: IBM now has over 290,000 Apple Macs and other devices deployed – November 12, 2019
[Attribution: 9to5Mac. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
