Apple has made an exciting announcement at its WWDC21 keynote on Monday, including a lot of upgrades on iOS 15, the new macOS Monterey, big improvements to FaceTime, and more. Among the new features and upgrades, we are most excited about Declarative Device Management (DDM), which we believe will have a major impact on the future of device management.

One of the challenges of today’s MDM protocols is that they are server-based and rely on a device to check-in to identify state changes and enforce policies. This has limitations as the MDM server needs to keep track of changes by continuously polling the device. We can provide similar capabilities using mobile threat defense solutions. With declarative device management, our MDM capabilities will be further enhanced as the MDM server will be notified of state change on the device directly from the OS. This will further improve the overall interaction between the device and server.

While there are workarounds to the current server-based protocol, none are elegant or efficient. Another challenge is the overload on both network and UEM servers having to constantly poll and apply policies to the entire device fleet.

With declarative device management, the device is empowered to be autonomous and is able to proactively apply policies independent of the UEM server. This new approach is in many ways what agent-based management of Windows devices might look like, however it would eliminate a burden of having to run a myriad of agents on the device.

We are really excited about this update and what it means to the future of device management. Stay tuned to learn more about DDM itself and how we plan to integrate it into our UEM portfolio.