Top Mac Interop Challenge? Survey says ... Active Directory Integration

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

The Enterprise Desktop Alliance - which Centrify co-founded - just published a comprehensive survey of Mac usage within large organizations. Besides finding that 74% of IT organizations surveyed plan to add more Macs this year, it determined that the top interoperability challenge with Macs is ... integration with Active Directory.

The survey also noted that 91% of the IT administrators felt that integration and management parity between Macs and PCs were major issues of importance to their organization, making it clear that organizations want to be able to manage all systems and platforms in one consistent manner. Chimed in analyst Laura Didio: "The importance of integration and management parity with PCs is an indication that the Mac users realize that getting Macs is easier to do if they can be managed."

[Centrify obviously agrees with that sentiment. As some of our readers may recall, besides providing the best AD authentication integration, Centrify was the first vendor to deliver the ability to use the Windows Group Policy infrastructure to manage the Mac OS X platform with Mac-specific Group Policies. On the market for over two years now, we still lead the industry in delivering the widest, deepest and most battle-tested set of GPOs to enable Mac desktop lockdown and configuration management. (For more information on our Mac solution, you can also check out this great webinar we did with Apple.) And we are the only vendor to provide robust Active Directory-based Mac smartcard support for CAC, PIV and .Net smartcards.]

Besides AD integration, here are the top five Mac Interop challenges identified by the IT staff surveyed:

• Integration with Active Directory (58%)
• Client management (inventory, patches, compliance) (53%)
• File sharing (42%)
• Configuration consistency (38%)
• Application compatibility (27%)

Speaking of Macs growing with the enterprise, an interesting article recently appeared in eWeek entitled "Macs Rebound at RAND" which you may find of interest. The article notes that at one point at RAND Macs were 80% of the desktops, went down to 20%, and now are starting to creep back up percentage-wise. RAND turns out to be a Centrify customer and this is what Dan O'Donnell, information systems security officer at RAND, said in the article about RAND's use of Centrify:

"To integrate Macs in its corporate environment, RAND is using Centrify Direct Control to authenticate Macintosh and Linux systems with Windows Active Directory. Although Apple offers its own tool for authenticating Macs on Active Directory, O'Donnell said Centrify's software works better and he is planning to use Centrify software to integrate Solaris, as well."

Finally, Centrify got another shout-out for its Mac support recently, this time in this ComputerWorld article entitled "Mac Management for Windows IT Folks":

"Centrify offers an alternative to relying on Mac OS X Server and Open Directory for client management. Direct Control for Mac OS X (pricing varies depending on your needs) provides the easiest solution for experienced Windows administrators because it actually implements additional group policies (at this point over 200 of them) in Active Directory via pre-packed schema extensions that can be used to manage Mac OS X.

If you're used to client management via group policies, Direct Control will feel very comfortable to you. (Direct Control versions for other Unix-based platforms are also available.)

On the client side, Direct Control installs as an alternative plug-in to the Active Directory plug-in shipped by Apple. One of the great features of Direct Control for Mac is that it actually leverages Apple's managed preferences architecture so that many of the key aspects of the Mac OS X environment can be managed using the group policies that ship with it."

No disagreements with that sentiment vis a vis Centrify :-)

It definitely should be interesting to see if Apple can continue to grow its market presence in the enterprise, especially in light of recent reports showing businesses and consumers are dramatically slowing down their desktop and laptop purchases.

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