Monday, 8.40am
Meet Claire, an illustrative example of a number of the IT leaders I meet and the challenges they face in these ever-changing times. Her Monday morning may sound very familiar to a lot of people reading this.
Claire leads the IT function for an organisation with about 350 devices. Three years ago they had a few Macs in the design team. Now there are over 300 of them, and the number keeps creeping up. More and more new hires are asking for a Mac when they join, and now with a company employee device choice program, it’s hard to say no.
Her team's good. Small, but good. The trouble is that only one of them, Jack, properly knows Jamf. And on this particular Monday Jack is in Tenerife, six new starters can't get their Macs to enrol, and the head of security has sent a one line email: Do we actually know what AI tools people are using?
Claire knew she needed more resource. The question was, what's the best way to get it?
Hire another Jack?
That was her first thought, and the obvious one. But when she started writing the business case, the salary turned out to be the easy bit. There were agency fees to pay, interviews to run and start dates to agree, plus National Insurance and pension on top. Then came onboarding, training and certification, and three or four months before the new person really knew the estate. Then, whenever they went on holiday, she'd be back where she started. Support was needed now.
So Claire took something else to the approval meeting with the finance team. What if, instead of another head, they brought in an Apple Technical Consultancy? One cost, agreed up front. An experienced team of Consultants behind it rather than one person.
Response times written into agreed SLAs, a clear change request process, and an end user desk function that could be put to good use. Claire also wanted better overall compliance and some extra backup for the upcoming ISO 27001 audit.
The Finance team didn't need much convincing. They liked the set cost, the flexible payment terms, and the fact that the resource would be there when they needed it.
The first few weeks
Nothing dramatic happened, which was sort of the point. The new consultants learned the existing environment, met the IT team and established the best communication routes for everyone. Jack had people to talk to about the device management set up too!
It didn't take long for the new resource to be put to good use. A profile change knocked a group of Macs off the Wi-Fi. Previously that would have meant a frantic morning with people staring at their laptops and troubleshooting the configurations that were in use. This time it was picked up and sorted inside the agreed SLA. Jack was in the office, as it happens, but he didn't need to drop what he was doing.
How tickets moved around changed too. Claire's team still carried out the first-line triage, because they knew the business and the people in it. Anything that needed more depth got passed to the consultants to resolve. Where it made sense, the DARE team just picked it up with the user directly, so nobody had to play messenger or relay "can you try restarting it" back and forth. Team productivity wasn’t a concern anymore, as they were in direct touch with the Consultant who could remote onto the machine and quickly solve the issue.
Team training
Because every ticket went through the same route, patterns started to show up. Half a dozen people a month asking how to share their screen in Teams. A spate of password change questions every time the new starters arrived, or the C-suite got new devices.
Those requests were flagged back to Claire each month, and a few of the team members needing more guidance were supported with a short how-to and a team-wide coaching slot at the all-staff meeting. Fewer tickets, and a more confident, productive workforce using their devices.
The other wins
Patching was another important win. Keeping third-party Mac apps current used to eat a chunk of someone's week. With Zappl, DARE's patch-management platform, that just happened in the background. Audit compliance increased, patching issues decreased and the team were using the latest application features.
Then there were the regular environment checks. Periodically, the estate got a proper once-over: blueprints reviewed and updated as Apple's declarative management evolved, the payloads for new devices tidied up so a Mac out of the box got today's setup and not last year's. Old policies that nobody remembered creating were quietly retired. This kept the Jamf environment current and meeting the needs of the wider team.
By about month three, Jack had finally started the identity project he'd been talking about since the previous summer. That probably tells you more than any of the above.
Apple in September
Anyone who manages Macs knows what September is like. Apple releases a new macOS, Jamf adds a load of new things at JNUC, and you spend weeks testing before you'll let anyone near the upgrade button. Usually you end up holding it back for a month or two anyway, just in case. This year the testing had been done against Claire's preferred setup before the release landed. The main apps, profiles, the enrolment flow, all checked. Claire was able to let the upgrade go out on a schedule she'd picked in advance, and it went smoothly.
The new features were the other half of it. Normally they'd sit unused until somebody had a free week to read up on them. Because the IT team had already worked through what was worth switching on with the consultants, they could then pick the two or three that actually mattered to the end users and get on with the live roll out.
That email about AI
Claire hadn't forgotten the security lead's question. She just didn't have a good answer. Plenty of people were clearly using AI tools. Which ones, and for what, nobody could really say. As luck would have it, Jamf released AI Governance in the summer of 2026. It shows you which AI tools are actually being used on your managed Macs, lets you set policy controls at the OS level, and produces reports you can hand to an auditor or pipe into your SIEM. It launched with support for things like Claude Code, Claude Desktop and OpenAI Codex, and it doesn't need another agent on the Mac.
Having the tool didn't settle anything on its own, though. Someone still had to decide what the rules were. Over a couple of sessions, Claire, Jack, the security lead and the consultants looked at what was really in use, applied best practice, and set up controls the wider teams could live with.
The next time security asked, Claire sent over the report, sorted.
A year on
When I chat to IT leaders like Claire at our account check-ins, hardly any of them talk about the technology first. They talk about the increased productivity, communication and the benefits to the IT team.
At board level, Claire could now provide a compliance score for the Mac estate against the security baseline they'd agreed, and show how it had moved over the year. Directors are much happier looking at a trend line and being informed everything's compliant and secure.
Finance also stopped asking about Apple. It was now a fixed line in the budget and meeting the service levels, Also, nobody had needed an emergency contractor since the spring. Security had their AI reporting. Her team were doing project work again and seemed a lot less frazzled for it. Users mostly noticed that things got fixed faster, which is about as much as users ever notice IT.
Jack now enjoys his breaks in Tenerife without any interruptions.
So, what's it like having consultants?
They don't replace your IT team, that's for sure. A good Consultant gives the people you've already got some support, access to their in-depth knowledge and a bit of breathing room. It also gives the team a trusted advisor to point to when they need to make a case to leadership, or for assistance with any compliance needs.
If you have found yourself nodding along and this all rings a bell, drop me a message. I'm always happy to chat and explore where we can help.