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JAMF Nation User Conference 2014: From Firewalls to Great Walls: Securing Mac in the People’s Republic Of China

From Firewalls to Great Walls: Securing Mac in the People’s Republic Of China

Alex McClements showed us ways to overcome the challenges of deploying Macs in a safe, secure, and legal manner when you're outside of the United States.

As the walls of corporations expand outside of the United States, so do the challenges for successfully deploying Macs in a safe, secure, and legal way. But luckily for us, we had Alex McClements, Senior Desktop Engineer with the CME Group in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to explain the barriers that may be encountered along the way.

Alex discussed topics ranging from global expansion to corporate espionage and from working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to working with the Boy Scouts of America (he had a sense of humor).

Challenges arose when attempting to deploy Macs in the People’s Republic of China, including sourcing equipment in Asia, permits, data integrity, and remote support. All of these challenges centered around providing a high grade of enterprise security to protect against malware and data intrusion.

As a solution, Apple provides the perfect platform in OS X for deploying and securing laptops oversees when security challenges are present — including advanced built in security, high availability, globally consistent specifications, and the lack of a TPM chip.

“Mac is easy and consistent,” Alex stated, as he outlined the benefits of using the Apple platform in remote and highly secure environments.

Alex discussed how the Casper Suite has helped him enhance and expand on Apple’s native deployment and security capabilities with modular imaging, Self Service, FileVault 2 encryption enforcement, administrative rights management, passcode enforcement, and Gatekeeper integration. Alex leverages the granular encryption and configuration profile settings in the Casper Suite to prevent rogue provisioning and he uses Self Service to guide installation of software, printers and settings so that all technology is compliant and sensitive data is not compromised.

Alex walked us through the steps to overcome deployment and security obstacles regardless of your location around the world. 

Watch the full video of this session now.

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