Jamf Blog
October 20, 2021 by Jesus Vigo

What Jamf Protect taught us about our environment

Join Kat Garbis, Business Development Executive - Enterprise Markets, Jamf, and Eric Boyd, Apple Infrastructure Architect, UC San Diego Health, as they discuss a year in review with Jamf Protect implemented for healthcare.

Here are the highlights:

  • Overview of Apple & Jamf Infrastructure: Healthcare industry, regulated by HIPAA, as well as FERPA due to learning environment.
  • Adopting Jamf Protect: Existing solutions in place did not meet the security needs and compliance requirements necessary for the organization, opening the way for Jamf products and the holistic solution they provide.
  • Challenges & Successes: Managing Apple devices in a mixed network environment, while attending to the specific needs of its users.
  • Findings & Lessons Learned: Leveraging Jamf software products to provide purpose-built support of Apple mobile devices and macOS endpoint security proved to be the best solution for their environment.

When asked by Garbis, about what kinds of experience they had with gathering device data from the security software products developed by other vendors and used to manage their Apple devices, Boyd, shared:

“We were really struggling with our other solutions to be able to identify that and tie that back to a Mac... Things that we were finding in Jamf Protect we didn’t necessarily have visibility to in the other solutions we were using, so a lot of the more Mac-specific threats may not have made it into the other vendors”

Boyd discusses some of the challenges that the team regularly encountered prior to integrating Jamf Pro to work alongside Jamf Protect, which allowed the team to “gain a lot more visibility than what we were able to see previously." (Referring to the wealth of insights that are used as metrics to determine device health, security posture and compliance status, which allow security teams to better identify, respond to, triage & mitigate potential threats before they become something worse.)

Further along during the presentation, Garbis asks Boyd about any of the features or benefits that really stand out when using Jamf Protect for Mac endpoint protection. While Boyd mentions several features, one of the more low-key yet incredibly useful features mentioned is: the dashboard! Specifically, the ability for members of the InfoSec team to obtain identifying data about any analytic, such as the change management status for patches that protect against a particular vulnerability. At a glance, anyone from the team can visually confirm compliance with this policy — and conversely — determine what resources may need to be leveraged in order to mitigate Mac security threats for any devices that are out of scope.

Doubling down on the security benefits of Jamf Protect’s macOS malware protection, Garbis asserts that “any large organization is bound to encounter security threats,” positing what kinds of threats or malicious behavior Boyd was seeing on the network. In response, the integration between Jamf Pro and Jamf Protect has made that easier for the InfoSec team “to see all of the processes and essentially that process chain, so we’re able to make a more informed decision, now exactly what is on that device by comparing its record with what’s in Jamf Pro and then being able to associate the two and to adjust what our risk factors are.”

This level of information permits the team to make more informed decisions for next steps, such as whether a field tech should be dispatched to further analyze the device, collect it or simply leverage Jamf Pro to obtain information on unauthorized software or suspicious binaries.

This one-on-one presentation style allows Garbis and Boyd to raise many good points that pertain to multiple industries, such as healthcare or education, and how industries have their own unique set of needs, including balancing regulatory compliance requirements, maintaining a customer experience that is beloved by Apple users, while securing devices, users and data.

Register for JNUC to access this session as well as the other sessions on-demand.

Photo of Jesus Vigo
Jesus Vigo
Jamf
Jesus Vigo, Sr. Copywriter, Security.
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