Jamf has announced a series of significant updates to Jamf Protect, introducing a unique set of technologies designed to make enterprise devices more secure while also identifying and responding to incoming endpoint threats. The company also introduced, Jamf Trust, which aims to make this kind of security simple to use. (The latter is also available for Android and Windows.)

What's new in Jamf Protect?

The big news for Mac security, Jamf Protect, now offers a comprehensive endpoint and network security solution, supplementing its existing protections with new tools for:

• Network threat prevention. This now combines threat prevention and remediation with network-based attack indicators.
• Comprehensive endpoint and network threat monitoring and logging. Logging such events makes it easier for InfoSec teams to detect or remediate threats and investigate incidents when they do take place.
• Controls to ensure sensitive data can only be written from the Mac to encrypted USB drives. This should help manage data leakage.

Jamf Protect is a powerful tool and provides a unique solution for Mac endpoint protection. It's supported by the company's own in-house team of security researchers. Used on its own, it can prevent and quarantine malware;  when used alongside JamfPro for MDM, it can do more to secure deployments, including locking down or erasing compromised Macs.

Why do these moves by Jamf matter?

Apple's enterprise market is far bigger now than it has been in decades, with its products in use across most of the world's biggest firms and a growing place in small enterprise. IDC recently reported that the Mac has become the fastest-growing computer worldwide among enterprises, with iPhones and iPads also seeing a lot of use.

Particularly during the pandemic, this has led businesses to recognize the need to protect these many Apple endpoints, supplementing the platform's industry-leading security with additional protection. Zero-trust, location-specific, user-related single-sign-in approaches have evolved rapidly over the last two years.

These latest new features add a component of automated situation awareness to the mix, which is a promising tech for fleet security.

New on the block: Trust and Safe Internet

JamfTrust is designed to be an easy-to-use employee focused app that gives your staff access to powerful security capabilities without affecting performance or productivity. It provides workflows related to the company's suite of security products and aims to eliminate the friction employees may feel when using these.

The company plans to launch JamfTrust for iPhones, iPads, Macs, Android, and Windows systems next month.

[Also read: How not to upgrade your enterprise technology]

The company has also ramped-up internet protection with its student/K12 education product, Jamf Safe Internet. It combines content filtering and network threat prevention features, including the capacity to protect users from  malware and phishing attacks.

The company says it will filter results without invading privacy or affecting the learning experience. This is slated to be available for macOS and iOS in summer.

What Jamf says

"Jamf is one of the very few companies in the world that offer both endpoint management and endpoint security - giving Jamf the unique ability to identify, prevent, and remediate security threats automatically," Jamf CEO, Dean Hager told the author.

"And of the few companies in the market that do both, Jamf is the only provider that manages and secures the Apple-first enterprise, which is a critical differentiator since the iPhone is the#1 phone in the enterprise; the iPad is the#1 enterprise tablet; and the Mac is the fastest growing computer in the enterprise.

"Apple provides the endpoints for businesses of the future. Jamf not only supports this growth, we drive it by delivering a consumer-simple experience that employees love and an enterprise-secure solution that organizations trust," he said.

"Organizations should not have to choose between comprehensive security and exceptional usability in today's work anywhere environments," Michael Covington, vice president of portfolio strategy at Jamf, said in a statement. "That's why we are excited to expand on the security capabilities available in the enterprise-secure, consumer-simple platform our customers know and love.

"We want organizations to confidently send devices into the world that have good baseline configurations that can detect and stop malware compromise, and that are equipped with preventative measures to block inbound attacks like phishing from impacting worker productivity."

Jamf is on a roll as Apple's enterprise share expands. Not only does it now protect more than 26 million devices, but the company also recently introduced two new Apple admin tools - one to simplify and automate Mac app installations in business, another to manage and secure Apple devices at SMBs.

We're witnessing a rapid increase in activity across the entire Apple integration space as MDM vendors strive to serve this expanding market.

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