I should clarify, that while I am not entirely sure MDM is dead in the future, I am starting to see the writing on the wall.  Why does anyone actually care about device management anymore?  I do not say this without some knowledge of the industry, I spent almost 5 years and MobileIron, and 10 years before that at Tangoe/Internoded working at an MSP that specializes in MDM.  Let me rephrase the question a little bit….

What exactly do you get out of MDM at this point?  If it is the ability to just remove corporate data when you lose the device, I would recommend you to reevaluate your mobile strategy.  Lets assume for a moment someone loses their device and they have a robot MAM strategy in place with conditional access.  You can quickly cancel all the users access to all applications and cloud repositories.  If you are in a cloud environment, honestly, I am starting to think there is very little reason to have anything inside of a perimeter.  Who cares anymore about the device?

We have an epidemic of companies selling solutions that really don’t solve the underlining problem.  How do I secure my data, no solution is going to solve this problem for you unless you understand how users access your data.   A wise man once told me, you never outsource anything you aren’t already really good at.

The question still remains, please explain to me why anyone needs MDM anymore?

Recently I’ve been challenged a lot by our internal team to tell them what is coming for certain technologies.  Like a lot of firms, we are also being asked how we can simplify our stack in the Microsoft world.  This involves all of O365, dynamics, Power Bi, Azure etc:  When working thru these issues, I’ve been looking at the Microsoft Road maps quite a bit.  I am honestly not sure when this feature launched, but it is fantastic.

When this website, I can now see what features are coming, a rough timeline on when it will be put into my stack, security updates and feature requests.  It also links well to the tech community forums Microsoft launched last year.  It also has versioning, at my company we have both a normal O365 E3 tenant and a O365 GCC high tenant.  I can now see which features come out with each.  Overall, it is fantastic and you should check it out.

I have always loved visiting the different MTC around the country.

They are region themed, this one obviously is very government based.