As governments everywhere continue to deal with the economically damaging fallout of last week’s appalling Crowdstrike/Microsoft disaster, it’s no surprise to see more governments switching to Apple’s most stable platform.

To put things into context, Parametrix Insurance has analyzed the consequences of last week’s global blue screen of death incident and assesses the economic cost of the moment on the world economy as being in the multiple billions of dollars. Estimated direct financial loss across the Fortune 500 was $5.4 billion, Parametrix said. 

That’s a painful amount to lose.

This did real damage

While it has subsequently been claimed that 97% of affected systems are back in operation, that still leaves hundreds of thousands of business-critical PCs that aren’t doing their job. I’ll be looking more closely at these consequences next week. I imagine businesses that became reliant on these products are already exploring their options — after all, that kind of $5.4 billion cost was almost certainly never anticipated by IT departments when estimating the TCOs of their PC fleets.

These incidents will undoubtedly make a lot of people think twice when it comes to their next hardware upgrade. After all, as business becomes increasingly mobile, and services migrate to the cloud, the strength of vendor lock-in is shrinking to the extent that it is becoming much easier to transition to multiple platforms to build business resilience against future debacles — or move to a platform characterized by lack of such drama, which is Apple.

Is it time to migrate?

Apple is ready if you are. 

Not only is the company now equipped with a wide and diverse range of enterprise-focused companies such as Addigy, Jamf, Kandji and all the other firms I speak with each week, but its future-focused platforms are inherently more resilient by design. That’s why Apple dumped support for kernel extensions years ago, among other examples. While no platform is ever completely secure, the vast majority of problems on Apple’s platforms emerge through user error, not globally deployed automated PC-borking software updates.

Of course, the bias that Apple is a consumer product that isn’t fit for the enterprise runs deep, and shifting that view is taking time — though events such as the Crowdstrike disaster should help people question that opinion. 

I think the momentum to diversify is growing. 

Apple is ready for government

That the German government is switching to Apple speaks to this trend. The procurement office of Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community’s (BMI) recently concluded a deal with Bechtle for the supply of up to 300,000 Apple devices across the entire federal administration. That means all government agencies will use iPhones and iPads equipped with Apple’s iNDIGO (iOS Native Devices in Government Operation) platform.

iNDIGO offers built-in security features, regular updates, hardware-based encryption and strict data protection policies and has been approved by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) for the secure sharing of confidential content classified as “for official use only” (VS-NfD).” 

It’s very similar to the increasing adoption of Apple products across US government. Apple is also “actively participating in several governmental security evaluations and certifications globally,” the company says.

Time to switch?

As I see it, for companies looking to build more resilience in IT after the Crowdstrike strike, news that Apple’s platforms are considered good enough and secure enough for active use by national governments should lay to rest the utterly mistaken myth that Apple’s devices aren’t good for business. Apple is now ready for government. It’s ready for business.

Finally, of course, regardless of whatever platforms you choose to deploy, it seems sensible to check the terms and conditions of any mission-critical service to ensure you’ll get compensated in the event a software patch breaks your business and costs you money. Why should any customer pay for a product that fails?

Please follow me on Mastodon, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.

From the editors of Computerworld, this enterprise buyer’s guide helps IT staff understand what the various unified endpoint management (UEM) platforms can do for their organizations and how to choose the right solution.

The Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia (CNMC), Spain’s competition authority has begun an audit of Apple’s App Store, according to Reuters.

According to the authority, Apple may have introduced different commercial conditions for developers who sell mobile applications through the App Store. If so, Apple risks fines of up to 10% of the company’s global revenue.

Apple denies any wrongdoing, saying Spanish developers of all sizes compete on equal terms on the App Store. The company says it will continue to work with the CNMC to sort things out.

The App Store has also come under scrutiny by other European regulatory agencies as well as in the UK.

Apple introduces new iPhone models every fall. This year’s model will, of course, introduce significant support for artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of Apple Intelligence — but what else is expected from the company’s most important product? We’ve filtered through the rumor-mill to find out so you, or your business, can get some perspective on whether it’s time to update your iPhone fleet.

Things are happening in the background

In the shadows, things are moving fast. Apple Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams visited Shenzhen, China this week. He met with senior Chinese officials and discussed various plans, including the new applied research lab the company intends to open. Call me suspicious, but I can’t help but imagine Williams might have also visited the Foxconn factory there to check the manufacturing process and sign off on iPhone production, given factories in India and in China are now recruiting staff to build the next-generation Apple smartphone. (India now accounts for 14% of global iPhone production, and that is expected to accelerate as Cupertino builds more resilience into its supply chain with its China+ strategy.)

Apple executives also seem to have visited other key companies across the supply chain in recent months, with CEO Tim Cook meeting with suppliers in China and Vietnam as recently as April. Apple announced plans to spend more on suppliers in Vietnam during that visit. While all roads don’t necessarily lead to phone, it’s not at all unlikely that component deals will be part of the conversation. That India recently relaxed some tariffs on imported smartphone components also seems relevant.

In other words, the body of (circumstantial) evidence says the Apple machine is preparing to hum into action. So, what should we expect? 

A processor fit for AI phone

The faster A18 chip is expected to be 3-nanometers, which suggests performance and battery life improvements. Power efficiency is also expected from the improved display in the devices, and it’s possible the company might seek to further differentiate its Pro family device with A18 Pro chips. 

AI is what will be driving the sales pitch here. Those A18 Pro chips will possibly feature a more powerful neural engine, making the devices the ultimate in Apple AI phones. That’s also why the RAM inside increase, up to 8GB, speculation claims.

Apple will hit the market hard, pushing home the message that these iPhones are the world’s most advanced devices for mobile AI, with a processor more capable than anyone else’s, and a private, on-device AI to help you get things done. We’ll find out the extent to which AI is being hyped in due course.

Bigger, tougher, heavier

Expect larger 6.3-in. and 6.9-in. OLED display sizes for the Pro and Pro Max models. The non-pro iPhones will remain the same size as current models, while the pros will be a little wider, taller, and a tiny bit heavier than current models. The displays might also be more scratch-resistant than before.

Apple’s spatial reality field

The 48-megapixel cameras will introduce a new vertical camera lens, likely to make the devices more capable of capturing spatial video. The iPhone 16 Pro could also gain the 5x optical zoom introduced in the Pro Mac last year.

Capture and action buttons

Speculation claims we should expect new capture (like a camera shutter) and action buttons on all the new iPhones. Apple introduced an Action button with the iPhone 15 Pro models in 2023.

Uh-oh: New prices

Driven by increasing component costs, the company is likely to include price increases across the range, so don’t be too surprised.

Battery improvements

The iPhone 16 Pro models might use stacked battery technology. This means batteries have a better lifespan and last longer between charges than before. It seems plausible Apple has shifted to this tech because it expects iPhone users to run a lot of processor intensive AI tools on the devices. There’s good news for charging, too, with 40W wired charging and 20W MagSafe charging, up from 27/15W, respectively.

Networking

The Pro models will be equipped with Wi-FI 7 and use improved versions of Qualcomm’s 5G radios, which are smaller, use less power, and support 5G Advanced. The latter is kind of important if your company is using private or sophisticated 5G services, as they are likely to work better on these devices. Standard iPhones might at last get Wi-FI 6E.

Under display Face ID?

Recent industry news in which a UK component supplier lost its Apple business hints that the company might make changes to FaceID. What those changes are remains unknown: Could these be the first iPhones to ship with under-display FaceID?

USB-C

This is inevitable. And overdue.

More to come

Expect the trickle of iPhone predictions to continue right up until Apple introduces the device in fall. Until it does, take all the speculation with a large pinch of salt. 

What about the iPhone 17?

Apple rumors are heading into prescience. We’re also being told the iPhone 17 lineup for 2025 is expected to include the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Max. 

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says there will be a new iPhone 17 slim mode next year. He believes Apple will make a series of changes to enable that slim phone, including the introduction of a single camera lens; with a 6.6-in. display, A19 chip, and Dynamic Island, the device should still impress. What we don’t know is whether the 5G chip Apple plans will be one made by Apple. Kuo seems to think it will — and that this will be the most expensive iPhone you can buy.

Please follow me on Mastodon, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.

Meta’s newly unveiled Llama 3.1 family of large language models (LLMs), which includes a 405 billion parameter model as well as 70 billion parameter and 8 billion parameter variants, is a boon for enterprises and a bane for proprietary LLM vendors, analysts and experts say.

Regulatory authorities in the EU, UK and US have signed a joint statement to ensure effective competition in the AI ​​sector, according Reuters. In the statement, they write that generative AI (genAI) has developed rapidly in recent years and that technological inflection points can introduce new ways to compete, innovate, grow, and catalyze opportunities.

The three parties also pledged that they will work together under their respective laws to ensure that the AI ​​market remains competitive and that both consumers and businesses are treated fairly.

This includes fair treatment, prevention of exclusionary tactics, and close scrutiny of investments and collaborations between today’s AI bigwigs and rising upstarts in the market.

In this case study, Deryck Webb from the Government of Alberta (GoA) explains how Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and Nerdio enabled employees to access workspaces from anywhere across the most remote parts of Canada — particularly vital for those involved in critical services, such as wildfire management.

Originally relying on on-premises Citrix and VMware solutions, GoA found Azure Virtual Desktop to be a more robust, cost-effective alternative as part of its Microsoft 365 licensing. By partnering with Nerdio, GoA was able to streamline its Azure Virtual Desktop deployment, providing seamless access and improved user experience for over 3,000 monthly active users.

The intuitive Nerdio platform enabled the GoA team to efficiently manage virtual machines and optimize resource allocation, creating a secure and reliable remote work environment, while Nerdio’s advanced analytics and Auto-scaling features allowed the organization to save up to CAD $36,000 monthly on AVD storage.

about how the Government of Alberta leveraged Nerdio to enable remote work here.

With the evolution of the cloud, cloud services are becoming broadly accessible and are a more viable option to deliver virtual desktops from the cloud. However, many organizations also struggle with the transition to the cloud due to the new skills required and a different approach to infrastructure and operations. Nerdio changes the game by simplifying and enabling efficient and effective operational tooling through automated deployment and configuration features, streamlined setup, and cost-effective running of cloud environments.

Greater visibility of cloud costs

Managing cloud costs effectively is a significant challenge for many organizations. As they transition to cloud-based solutions, they often find their budgets spiraling out of control due to a lack of visibility and understanding of their cloud spend. Without the correct building blocks in place, these companies exceed their cloud budgets and fail to optimize their resources properly, leading to inefficiencies and unnecessary expenses. Nerdio Manager for Enterprise addresses these pain points by providing comprehensive control, confidence, and visibility into cloud spending:

• Sophisticated reporting and real-time analytics: Nerdio’s intuitive dashboard provides insights into overall cloud expenditures and expert guidance on how to achieve additional savings in real time.
• Advanced Auto-scaling: The platform fine-tunes resource allocation, adjusting up or down as needed to ensure that you only pay for the resources you’re actually using. This dynamic scaling capability not only optimizes costs but also ensures that the necessary resources are available when needed.

Based on what we’ve seen across our existing client base, Nerdio Manager’s Auto-scaling can easily save you up to 75% on Azure compute and storage costs.

Simplify management and optimize productivity

Managing and scaling Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) can be a complex and time-consuming task, particularly given the limited native management tools available in Azure. Organizations often struggle with scaling and require a robust solution to deploy at scale with the IT resources you have in-house.

Additionally, companies migrating from Citrix or VMware expect comprehensive management capabilities, which are often lacking in the native Azure platform. This gap necessitates highly skilled technical resources to architect, build, deploy, and manage their AVD environments.

Nerdio Manager for Enterprise simplifies the entire process under one comprehensive management tool. With Nerdio, even IT generalists can build, deploy, and manage Azure Virtual Desktop environments efficiently thanks to these product features:

• Image management: Nerdio automates, manages, and schedules critical but mundane tasks, freeing up IT teams to focus on other essential duties. This automation not only saves time but also reduces the risk of human error.
• Rapid deployment: You can deploy Azure Virtual Desktop environments within a few hours or connect to an existing environment in as little as 10 minutes with minimal manual intervention. Nerdio’s intuitive interface streamlines the provisioning of virtual desktops, making the process quick and efficient.

The automation built into Nerdio Manager for Enterprise ensures you can scale and manage your virtual desktop environments effectively in 20% of the time it would normally require.

Secure and protect

Ensuring the security and protection of your Azure Virtual Desktop environment is crucial for business continuity. Downtime can have significant financial repercussions, making robust disaster recovery and security features essential. Nerdio Manager for Enterprise enhances the security and resilience of your Azure Virtual Desktop deployment, providing advanced tools to safeguard your virtual desktop infrastructure:

• Disaster recovery (DR): The dynamic Auto-scaling previously mentioned can also be leveraged for DR. This functionality ensures that your resources can scale up or down in response to demand fluctuations, maintaining operational efficiency and minimizing downtime. By dynamically adjusting resources, Nerdio helps organizations avoid the substantial financial losses associated with prolonged outages.
• Role-based access control (RBAC): The RBAC feature ensures that permissions are tightly managed inside Azure, giving users access only to the resources necessary for their roles, thereby enhancing overall security.
• Secure deployment model: Nerdio Manager for Enterprise is deployed as an Azure application directly in your own subscription. This ensures that sensitive management operations are conducted within the customer’s own controlled and secure Azure infrastructure, further enhancing the security of the AVD environment.

Nerdio offers comprehensive security and protection features, ensuring that your AVD deployment is both resilient and secure while minimizing risks and potential financial losses.

Whether it’s troubleshooting technical issues, optimizing performance, or navigating licensing requirements, Nerdio’s comprehensive suite of tools and features helps IT teams of all sizes maximize their AVD investment while driving operational excellence and fostering a more productive workforce.

Explore Nerdio Manager for Enterprise on your own in our self-guided demo.

Legacy virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions that rely on centralized servers and complex infrastructure are not well-suited for the dynamic and diverse needs of modern organizations. Instead, many are looking for a cloud-based alternative that reduces complexity and total cost of ownership.

A few years ago, legacy VDI solutions were vital to organizations seeking to bolster application delivery management, unified endpoint management, and security capabilities. But they are often expensive, difficult to manage, and prone to performance issues.

Desktop as a service (DaaS) solutions leverage the cloud to deliver virtual desktops on demand and provide many benefits that on-premises systems lack, such as improved security, scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. Users can access virtual desktops on demand from internet-connected devices while the organization can simplify and automate application management with less costly, scalable solutions.

Microsoft Azure is renowned for its robust security features and compliance certifications, and Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) leverages those capabilities to provide a secure virtual desktop environment. From data encryption and access controls to threat detection and identity management, Microsoft AVD helps organizations mitigate security risks and ensure compliance with industry regulations and standards. 

Still, not all IT organizations want to handle the extensive customization and configuration options that can optimize AVD for specific organizational requirements. In some cases, they don’t have the time it takes for IT staff to acquire training and familiarization with the Azure platform. As in many areas of IT, a managed platform option can supplement overtaxed internal resources.

Avoiding tedious migration efforts

Radius Recycling, an operator of large recycling facilities and its own steel mills, used a legacy VDI provider and was reliant on old servers running on Windows 2008 to host custom applications developed in-house. It was breaking so often that Radius felt it was completely unstable and untenable. The company’s development team began the process of migrating to Azure the main SQL server, which was supporting 50 Pick-n-Pull lots across the US and Canada.

With one IT staffer tasked with rebuilding apps from scratch and deploying them on Windows 10, the process was inefficient and tedious. Then that staffer learned about Microsoft AVD with Nerdio Manager for Enterprise. Microsoft AVD and Nerdio support more than 500 monthly active users at Radius Recycling, easing the burden on the help desk and providing employees with improved performance of third-party apps.

Onboarding was relatively simple without the need for an elaborate new vendor procurement process because Nerdio Manager is installed directly from the Azure Marketplace into the customer’s tenant.

Microsoft AVD with Nerdio allows organizations to leverage Microsoft’s significant investments in AVD, Intune, and Windows 365 services. Nerdio Manager for Enterprise enhances Microsoft’s native components instead of replacing them with proprietary functions. There’s no lock-in, so organizations can remove Nerdio Manager without impacting users or infrastructure.

With the advantage of Nerdio’s modern, unified platform, IT professionals can deliver and maintain a wide range of virtual Windows endpoints and Windows applications across hybrid workforces with ease and utilize powerful monitoring and analytics for maximum effectiveness.

Organizations can fully manage the entire lifecycle of desktop images without the need for PowerShell scripting. The platform offers Scripted Actions that enable IT Admins to create images in less than 30 minutes. Meanwhile, companies can reduce Azure compute and storage costs by up to 80% using AVD with Nerdio’s Auto-Scaling capabilities.

Organizations need greater flexibility to adapt to changing business needs. To learn how Microsoft AVD with Nerdio can help modernize IT infrastructure and enhance user productivity, visit us here.

The advantages of cloud computing come with notable challenges that frustrate enterprises, particularly managing costs and optimizing resources. Desktop as a service (DaaS) is one notable cloud service that can be complex and requires careful planning and monitoring to avoid overspending and underutilization, leading many to turn to managed platforms that can ease those burdens.

Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) stands out as a leading enterprise VDI solution, offering unparalleled scalability, security, and flexibility for organizations of all sizes. The virtual desktop operating system is used to securely host desktops and applications in the cloud. It is highly scalable and flexible, renowned for robust security features, and it offers a cost-effective, consumption-based pricing model.

Many organizations, though, face a steep learning curve in implementing and managing AVD, especially if the IT team lacks experience with cloud-based virtual desktop environments. Configuring AVD’s extensive customization options and optimizing it for specific organizational requirements takes planning and expertise. That’s led some to augment AVD with Nerdio Manager for efficient applications management, streamlining support for hybrid workforces, and providing a single pane of glass for overseeing AVD, Windows 365, physical devices, and Windows applications.

AVD with Nerdio enables organizations to modernize their IT infrastructure and enhance user productivity. Nerdio significantly reduces the learning curve associated with AVD by offering intuitive management interfaces and step-by-step guidance tailored for IT administrators.

Avoiding cloud utilization headaches

Unoptimized cloud computing costs can create major headaches for IT and finance teams. But Nerdio’s patented Auto-Scaling feature can reduce Azure compute and storage costs by as much as 80%. Nerdio Manager for Enterprise automatically swaps out OS disks from SSD to HHD when VMs are not running, and it automatically expands and reduces the Azure Files IOPS and sizes to meet storage needs based on usage.

Nerdio’s Auto-Scaling and automation enabled the IT organization at Canada’s Equitable Bank to turn virtual machine schedules on and off as AVD usage and demand fluctuated. This resulted in 74% savings on compute per month compared to the previous environment. The bank now manages approximately 1,900 end users with Nerdio, seamlessly connecting employees across Canada with a cloud-based solution.

With Nerdio’s storage optimization of Azure Files and Azure NetApp Files, Log Analytics, OS disk swapping, Advanced Predictive Drain Mode, and multiple scaling triggers, organizations can closely match the Azure infrastructure to user demand in real time. This ensures maximum efficiency in utilizing AVD’s consumption-based pricing.

Nerdio can fully manage desktop images, utilizing Scripted Actions to easily enable the creation of images in less than 30 minutes and install the software that is needed without having to log onto the VM. This avoids manual image creation or utilizing DevOps, Packer, or some other complicated method.

An automated approach to provisioning AVD with Nerdio ensures consistency and reliability across deployments, mitigating the risk of errors and ensuring a seamless user experience.

In 2021, the University of North Florida (UNF) undertook a major strategic initiative to digitally transform and migrate to the cloud to better serve the student body, faculty, and staff. When beginning the transition to Azure Virtual Desktop, they found that it was more agile and improved performance—but the native capabilities were limited, making it challenging to manage and automate, so it turned to Nerdio Manager for Enterprise to improve the AVD environment.

“Unlike with our previous virtualization solution, I no longer have to sit around to see if machines are being over-utilized,” said Michael Holmes, Assistant Director of Endpoint Management at UNF. “I don’t need to move users around or re-image my hosts in the middle of the day. Nerdio handles it all gracefully, ensuring a seamless user experience.”

Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop ensures a uniform and efficient user experience for employees and contractors alike, whether they’re working remotely, on the move, or within offices. But if you don’t have the resources or the desire to master how to optimize AVD performance and utilization, learn more about how Nerdio can provide the expertise and support services needed to ensure a seamless experience for end users and maximize the value of your investment.