Kolide and Apple Business Essentials

Today, Apple announced Business Essentials, a new service that enables small businesses to manage their Apple devices just as easily as using them. You can read more about the service that launches next spring in their press release. It’s an exciting development for many businesses that found the existing MDM industry challenging to navigate and are looking for a first-party solution.

In the context of this announcement, we want to make our intentions clear to our current customers, prospects, and partners: we plan to embrace this new offering and will discontinue our existing efforts to compete in the MDM space. Instead, Kolide will continue to focus its efforts on what it does best: providing relevant and actionable recommendations to your employees that meaningfully reduce security issues and compliance risks.

We are making this decision because we continue to see a dramatic need for organizations to establish a communication channel with end-users to fix serious security problems on devices that cannot be remediated through automation alone. Solving this extremely nuanced problem is where our passions lie, and we know we can add immense value.

Kolide’s honest approach to obtaining device visibility via informed consent, opt-in style enrollment, and commitment to total transparency is in direct alignment with Apple’s value system and the value systems of its customers. So to hear Apple embracing once-radical ideas, like separation of employee data and personal data, gives us great confidence that together we can set the gold standard for true honest security and device management.

We want to thank all of you for your continued support and enthusiasm for Kolide. We are having a banner year, and it’s been incredibly validating to see what were once just high-minded ideals become a tangible reality for tens of thousands of people working for organizations that we have admired for years.

For the few customers who are currently using our MDM preview, we are committed to ensuring you have a smooth transition to a new provider. You can find out more information about our Apple MDM retirement timeline and answers to other related questions in this help article.