Keynote: iOS 10 and enterprise.

For a mobility tech geek, June is a great time of year to see what problems Apple have seen in the current use of their devices software and told us how they are going to improve. I find I have small eureka moments, where something is highlighted that I subconsciously find incredibly annoying about iOS and OS X (now called macOS) and they've gone ahead and fixed it.

Some of the new iOS/macOS (new name) features excite me as a consumer and scare me as an enterprise mobility advisor.

A great example of this is the Universal Clipboard. This is easily the most useful feature for me. Think of it, I have a chunk of text, Skype/WebEx details or files in my clipboard on my iPhone and need to get it to my Mac. Before I would have to copy to Notes or email myself then wait for Notes to sync or my email to be sent to my Mac. Now I can Copy the needed data and hop to my Mac and Paste. Wow this will change my world!! 

*Puts enterprise security hat on* so an end user can open up their corporate email on a EMM managed device, copy text, facts and figures then hope over to their unmanaged iPad or Mac and hit paste. Instant data leakage!! "We need to restrict this immediately!!" Also where is this corporate data being stored in transit? Same concept, same fear for iCloud Drive Desktop Folders. I am assuming Apple iCloud servers in North Carolina. This is within NSA jurisdiction.  

Of course Apple will build into every new release, where there is a new capability for consumer enablement, a corresponding MDM API to restrict this new capability. However many companies I deal with will not review every new OS release, with what has been added in order that it can be restricted. Also are we missing the point here. These features have been developed to flow between our devices with ease be that with mobile, tablet or laptop/desktop. As soon as you restrict one device, the entire end user device synergy becomes caveated in terms of ability.

There are some features that I feel have legs in enterprise. The Phone app has been updated to include great new features such as transcribing voicemail into text, VoIP APIs so 3rd party client can look like they are native when receiving an incoming call, an API integration to highlight numbers that could be spam and a Cisco integration so you can get work calls on your mobile phone. This could potentially break the end user confusion experienced when trying to receive calls over VoIP clients.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204221

Not mentioned in the keynote but have appeared on the website since is the capability to remove native bloatware from the device. Most people using iOS will have a folder called "Apple Crap" or "CrApple" into which apps that are of no interest go (namely Tips, Videos, Stocks, Voice Memos etc). Even as an end user the inability to remove apps I will never use, is a constant reminder that I live in Apple's eco-system and not the other way round. The benefit to enterprise is even clearer and in fact is available today in iOS 9.3. An MDM API whereby you list the app bundle IDs you want to remove on enrolment into your EMM. Great if a customer facing device doesn't have Game Centre and iTunes U on the springboard to view.

Privacy was an interesting talking point given events in the last 6 months. I had to watch a few times over to really understand what Craig Federighi was trying to convey.

 Quote:
"One of the important tools in making software more intelligent is to spot patterns on how users are using their devices...differential privacy is research topic in the area of statistics and data analytics that using hashing, subsampling and noise injection to enable this crowd sourced learning while keeping the information of each user private." 

I may have to brush up on my subsampling and noise injection but essentially Apple is doing really cool stuff to make your world better and are not sacrificing user data to profile you in order to deliver this capability. Great to know and yet hard to prove would be my instinct in an enterprise setting. "Restrict it and turn it off!" Again something that I suspect will be included as an ability for enterprise devices in the MDM API set on release.

Interesting to note that iOS 10 is targeting all iOS except for iPad 2 and iPhone 4s and below. Considering these devices made the cut for iOS 9 it was probably about time for the axe. They are 5 years old but I would be inclined to believe there are a large number still performing tasks in enterprise use cases. Unlike the consumer setting enterprises will tend to not fix what aint broke.

There was of course plenty more to worry about if you are an IT security architect and plenty to be in awe of, as a consumer from Apple's Keynote. What are the stand out features for you?

If you missed the keynote watch it here.

Views are my own not my employers.