Announcing a Beta: Removable Storage Controls with Jamf Protect

What we announced

Many of our customers have been asking for more controls to help protect against data loss, specifically when it comes to removable media. With this new feature, you can ensure that sensitive business data is only written to encrypted USB mass media drives; protecting against physical loss and unauthorized data access.

How does that work? It’s simple really. With Jamf Protect, you can define which removable media devices may be mounted by your Macs. You can limit the removable media devices by:

• Vendor
• Product
• Serial Number
• Encryption status
• Or just plain all USB storage devices

For any storage devices that meets a defined criteria, one of the following permission will be enforced for it:

• Read only
• Read and write
• Not mountable

So now you can create enforcement policies such as, “Only allow Kingston USB drives to mount if they are encrypted and deny all others.”

What does the end-user see if they do attempt to mount a non-approved storage device? They will get an alert, which you can customize:

And while the savvy end-user may think they can work around this in Finder, they’ll soon be disabused of this notion.

Now, this feature is still undergoing some changes, especially on the configuration side of things, but we are eager to gather your feedback on the functionality. So let’s talk access to the Beta program.

Getting Access to the Jamf Protect Beta

Just like with other Jamf betas, your Jamf Account is key to this process.

Log into your Jamf Account and click on Product Feedback Programs. If you are an active Jamf Protect customer, you will see the option to request access to the Jamf Protect beta here.

Once you select the Jamf Protect beta, you will be asked to confirm the terms and conditions of the beta program before clicking on the “Enroll” button. Once you’ve enrolled, you will see that you are participating in the beta under the Product Feedback Programs section.

After you have completed these steps, you will receive an email communication from us to define a tenant name. Please note, that the whole tenant you choose will be enabled for this beta. If you provide us with your existing tenant name, we will do our best to make a slight modification to the provided name for your beta tenant so that your production tenant is unaffected.

You will also have access to a special feedback forum within Jamf Nation to interact with the product team and other customers in the beta program.

The future

We are super excited to hear from you and your experiences with controlling removable storage devices with Jamf Protect. Over the next months you’ll see us make improvements to this feature set and incorporate feedback that we’ve received in preparation for making this publicly available.