The Challenge: Find a Mac Management Service Provider for a Mid-Sized Nonprofit
Community IT Innovators has decades of experience supporting Mac-Windows hybrid environments and all-Mac offices. If your nonprofit has had difficulty finding an MSP that can support an all-Mac business or nonprofit environment, Community IT Innovators can perform an assessment and get your tech support up to speed in an Apple-based office environment.
The client is an alliance of hundreds of national partners and their local affiliates, working together to improve high school graduation rates and support students through volunteering and programming.
The staff has been using Apple computers for their day-to-day work for over a decade and they are comfortable using Apple. Moving to Windows would be a large technology project for them, with unknown risks and benefits. However, as Apple computers are designed for home users rather than enterprise environments, the management of Apple workstations at a business-wide level is a challenge for many organizations.
As the client grew, critical management of these devices such as inventory management, security patching and operating system upgrades became impossible to administer automatically. The client recognized this challenge early on and adopted a central Mac management system that was hosted on-premises.
As the organization made this transition, new challenges arose:
- Enterprise level Mac management systems are complex and therefore tend to be made for large enterprises, making support cost-prohibitive at small or mid-sized nonprofits.
- Mac management systems require high level technical expertise to configure, manage, monitor and integrate into day-to-day operations.
- These management systems are generally built to stand alone, forcing organizations to develop technical expertise in-house to manage them, adding unnecessary complexity to their network
- These management systems are generally unnecessarily powerful for non-profit organizations of small or medium size.
- Centralized Mac management is expensive to build in-house, generally time consuming to configure, and difficult to maintain.
In light of these challenges, the IT leadership at this client considered switching to Windows, but users’ productivity and preference for Mac workstations made that decision difficult. Knowing that their Mac management was deteriorating and affecting their ability to work, the IT leadership started to look for an outsourced Managed Service Provider (MSP) that could fully support Macs in a mid-sized nonprofit environment.
The Solution: Community IT Innovators’ Managed IT Mac Management.
We are one of the only MSPs serving nonprofits to offer Mac support services for nonprofits that want to outsource all or part of their IT support and hosted services.
We provide fixed-cost packages for all-Mac or hybrid Mac environments that are tailored to your needs and can include services like unlimited remote and on-site helpdesk support, proactive network management, and ongoing IT planning from our dedicated team of experts in nonprofit-focused IT.
We provide a dedicated IT Business Manager for each client. This Community IT staff member serves as a case manager, working with your executives, assessing and evaluating your IT needs and our responsiveness on an ongoing basis.
In the case of this client, Community IT was able to bring our expertise in Mac support to provide the service upgrade and return to the reliability they were searching for. We provide help desk support and a combination of remote and on-site staffing.
The Results: Reliable, Outsourced All-Mac Management at a Mid-Sized Nonprofit
Community IT remote Mac management matched the client’s business needs. The client did not renew their expensive license with the stand-alone Mac management vendor and decided to adopt the affordable and reliable Community IT Mac Management service.
Community IT Mac Management includes:
- A centralized platform that monitors all Mac workstations
- An accurate inventory of all Apple devices used for work, whether owned by the organization or purchased by the employee
- Vetting major version upgrades before launching across the organization
- Management of MacOS security updates in a consistent manner, scheduled once a month, driven by organization policies and not the end user
- Improved cybersecurity and end user security training. Many organizations rely too heavily on the low level of malware aimed at Mac systems and become overconfident of their ability to manage cybersecurity risks all organizations face.
- Encryption across all Mac workstations; encryption keys are managed centrally
- Technical expertise to manage the Mac management system
- All-remote, in-person, or hybrid remote/in person support
- Peace of mind leaving the Mac Management up to Community IT
Community IT was able to help the client move to the right IT solution for them, and helped them stay in an all-Mac enterprise level environment.
We are always ready to help our clients discover their real needs and constraints. We use our IT and nonprofit expertise to guide clients as they navigate their changing IT needs, as shown in this Mac Management Case Study. You can be sure we are dedicated to the success of your mission and will help you find the solution that fits you.