MDM

MDM — mobile device management — is the system that lets an organization configure, secure, and manage its devices centrally: laptops, phones, and tablets, wherever they physically are. It pushes software, enforces security policies like disk encryption and screen locks, manages certificates, and can remotely lock or wipe a lost or stolen device.

What once seemed like an enterprise luxury is now a baseline. If you're running company devices without MDM, you're managing them by hand and carrying real risk. The major caveat is that changing MDM providers later is consistently painful — particularly on Apple, where a push-notification certificate tied to a specific email address can be very awkward to change after the fact — so it's worth setting up thoughtfully from the start.

Providers include JumpCloud, Microsoft Intune, Jamf, Mosyle, Kandji, and others. Any of them beats nothing. The bigger decision is committing to device management early, before you have a sprawling fleet to retrofit.