JumpCloud CTO weighs in on Apple’s acquisition of Fleetsmith

Fleetsmith — a provider of “secure, automated Apple device management” solutions — announced on June 24 that it’s been acquired by Apple. And there’s been some debate after Apple unexpectedly disabled the Fleetsmith third party app catalog.

JumpCloud Chief Technical Officer Greg Keller has weighed in on the situation in an online blog. Here are some of the high points

° Since the acquisition was announced, and Apple unexpectedly disabled the Fleetsmith third party app catalog, there has been a flurry of debate over what will happen to Fleetsmith – and subsequently what the Mac admins using the Fleetsmith product need to do to maintain security and privacy for their organizations. More worrisome is the idea that Apple might significantly alter, or on the extreme end, close its open MDM API [application programming interface] platform.

° If Apple limits or drastically changes the open API while narrowing availability for third party vendors managing Apple devices, many of these customers will be left without tools for their specific needs.

° As a vendor that relies on that protocol to ensure that our customers can maintain security and manage fleets of all OSs from a single platform, we encourage Apple to keep its API and protocol open and easily consumable and maintainable for its ecosystem.

JumpCloud’s Directory-as-a-Service (DaaS) offers a  single point of authority to authenticate, authorize, and manage the identities of a business’s employees and the systems and IT resources they need access to.