Kandji becomes Iru, opens MDM for Windows and Android

Apple device management and security company Kandji has changed its name to Iru, reflecting a new approach to what it does while opening its offer up to Windows and Android. It means enterprises shifting to Apple tech can now manage all their legacy equipment using the same console — and benefit from Iru’s AI-powered unified IT and security platform introduced on Wednesday.

The Apple device management industry kind of grew up from nowhere. Now, as Apple enterprise deployment accelerates, market players are turning their hungry eyes on Windows and Linux. (Admins on those platforms also want effective tools that are easy to use.) 

I spoke with Kandji-now-Iru CEO Adam Pettit to find out more about what his company is doing, how he sees Apple’s accelerating surge in business and Iru’s decision to open up to Windows and Android.

Now managing Windows and Android, too

“The big change with Iru is that the company is no longer only about Apple device management, but now offers MDM capabilities for Windows and Android,” Pettit said in an interview. These capabilities extend across all three of the company’s primary services, including device management, endpoint protection and response capabilities, and vulnerability management, all three of which will become cross platform.

It’s not about leaving Apple to explore new pastures, he explained. “The first thing that’s really important to us, though, is making sure that it’s clear to customers that, at the end of the day, we are still as committed as ever to delivering the best in market, Apple device management and security solution. That remains unchanged. Customers that want to manage and secure their Apple devices can still come to us.”

It makes business sense

Opening up to other platforms makes business sense. Pettit confirmed that the percentage of devices in use at the organizations his company is working with is definitely trending toward Apple. “While a year or two ago, perhaps 20 to 30% of their workforce used Macs, now it’s 50 to 60%,” he said.

He also noted that over 80% of the customers who use Kandji for Apple device management security use something else, such as InTune, to manage their Windows or Android devices.“Dozens of customers every week who like our management tools for Apple — they have been asking for Windows support,” he said. 

(Perhaps reflecting Iru’s core commitment to Apple kit, IT admins can toggle Windows/Android support off if they don’t use it, removing any references to that support from the management interface.)

“We estimate roughly 20% of our customers are Apple only,” Pettit said.

What’s available?

Iru is a series of services unified by what’s called the Iru Context Model, “a unified context layer that builds a living map across users, apps, devices, posture, policy, and events.” Iru AI turns that live context into insights, actions, and audit-ready evidence to deliver outcomes point solutions can’t match, the company said.

“We use Iru AI in our combined products to do basically everything — map…, analyze, create custom tailored controls, answer questions from a customer trust portal, and so on,” Pettit said. “Your AI is basically a collection of capabilities that sits on top of and kind of uses our context model, which is this shared understanding of your environment.”

The Iru platform consists of the following:

Workforce Identity in the form of password-free single sign-on with hardware-backed passkeys and context-aware access to every app.

Endpoint Management, which includes onboarding, updating, and policy control across Apple, Windows, and Android — all with a single lightweight endpoint agent.

Endpoint Detection and Response based on machine learning-enhanced detections with autonomous containment and remediation.

Vulnerability Management with full visibility into software risks on Macs and Windows hardware and autonomous threat response powered by Iru AI.

Compliance Automation and a public portal to share certifications, reports, and security posture.

It seems relevant to note that JAMF introduced its own AI-powered security tools earlier this week.

Making the powerful simple

“With Iru, we collapse the stack and give IT and security teams time and control back,” said Pettit. “What made Kandji work was elegance through abstraction and automation as a force multiplier. With Iru, we’ve translated that approach into a new platform for the AI era. We’re bringing identity and access, endpoint security and management, and compliance automation together in one AI-powered platform so lean teams can move faster with less overhead.

“The reality is that one reason customers love Kandji, is the deep level of abstraction it provides.”

That means if they want something to be done, such as encryption, they can use the system to deploy it without the need to worry about which protocol it uses. It makes it possible to generate completely tailored controls with the click of a button. “We’re moving from endpoint to cross-platform endpoint, identity and compliance, all in one platform,” he said.

Trading places

Another trend Pettit sees reflected in IT is a tendency toward dissolving traditional siloes between, say, device management and security. The company cited recent research that showed many enterprise IT and security teams today juggle dozens of point tools with separate consoles and data silos, leading to “no shared context or single view, fractured workflows, constant tab switching, and dropped handoffs.”

That kind of inefficient approach is falling away with the convergence between historically different teams such as IT and security. “We’re also seeing a big convergence between compliance, security, and IT,” Pettit said. Iru aims to collapse these differences to give IT more time and efficiency than it had before.

“The alternative is all of these stitched-together point solutions that are used by these different personas that have to communicate with each other about what’s happening. And so, by bringing them all together on one platform, we’re actually building in a way that aligns with the kind of organizational shift that’s happening,” he said.

The Iru platform is available today for new customers, while existing Kandji users will transition to the new service. Iru also offers comprehensive migration support for customers moving from other systems.

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