How to create value in Higher Education with Jamf and Microsoft

Empowering students to choose the device that helps them best achieve their goals is the common objective that brought together Brian, Technology Coordinator at SDSU, and Simon, a Chief Technical Architect & Governance Lead and Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional), despite a 9-hour time difference between the professionals in the U.S. and Sweden.

During their JNUC session titled Jamf and Microsoft Working Together: What Can and Should You Do?, Brian and Simon were keen to demonstrate how Jamf and Microsoft can be combined to cater for the unique challenges of higher education, like budget constraints and the needs of individual faculties and researchers. Speaking to an audience of mostly education peers, Simon mentioned the importance of integration when it comes to hybrid environments:

“We need to focus on integration and not separation. Many of you probably already have the licenses both for the Jamf products and Microsoft products. To not leverage that is just throwing money away when you can get so much more value out of these licenses.”

To demonstrate the progress made by Brian and the team at SDSU, the presentation focused on a few capabilities:

• Device management, where you can combine Jamf Pro and Intune to create something that's better than each of these individually
• Identity tools with Single Sign-On, Entra ID and Jamf Pro
• Reporting, utilizing Microsoft Sentinel and Power BI
• Security with Jamf Protect and Intune

Start with the low-hanging fruit

For Simon and Brian, device management and Platform SSO are two features admins should consider implementing as soon as possible if licenses are available, as they provide great value.

To start managing devices through Jamf Pro, an encrypted Smart Group was set up by the team at SDSU, and a workflow through the company portal was established so users could get their devices added. Afterwards, devices and compliance statuses become available in Jamf Pro as well as Entra ID for review and reporting.

The team configured Platform SSO so that users could log in once and have their password synced with Entra ID. Users have a key role in ensuring that everything works as intended, and the promise of a smooth user experience was a great incentive for enrollment.

From a reporting and visualization standpoint, Simon demonstrated the seamless integration between Jamf Pro and Power BI, an easy to set up reporting solution that collects data from Jamf Pro into Power BI, giving IT teams the ability to share custom reports with stakeholders.

Protect data and defend from threats

Simon also demonstrated the use of Microsoft Sentinel to gather logs from various security sources into a single pane of glass. Data from Jamf Pro, Jamf Protect and others are all available to view from the Security Cloud.

Although it comes at an extra cost, Microsoft Sentinel provides native integration with Jamf Protect. You can query data from Jamf Protect and other available data sources using custom Query Language, including queries to display alerts and hunt for threats.

Simon also showed the use of Application Protection Policies using Microsoft Intune and Jamf Trust, to protect business data from apps installed even when the device is BYOD. He recommends policies to be established to ensure users install Jamf Trust on their devices. If there are threats on the device, certain apps that hold business data won’t open until defense measures are applied, or at all in case of high-level risk. For Simon, Jamf Trust is the solution of choice for threat defense on mobile devices, as it does not drain battery life.

Benefit from competing giants

For the presenters of this session, getting value out of existing tools and licenses is an important reason to come to JNUC and speak to other institutions. Integration between Apple and Microsoft is improving, and more companies will be able to benefit from their healthy competition. It is important that interested parties across the world get together, to share the wins and experiences and build a better future with technology.