MacStadium sees Apple adoption accelerating across US enterprises

Apple continues to experience accelerating adoption across business and enterprise environments, with a new US survey of 300 CIOs confirming the trend.  It shows not only that 96% of US CIOs expect their Mac fleets to grow in the coming 12 to 24 months, but that Apple already accounts for an average of 65% of enterprise endpoints. The adoption is delivering big benefits in productivity, reliability, and employee retention, but as usage grows some of the remaining weak points in what Apple offers to business are emerging.

Those are some of the findings from MacStadium’s inaugural CIO survey, which explores the evolution of Apple on the enterprise. The results show rapid Mac deployment across US business in the last two years, with 93% of CIOs claiming increased use, and 59% claiming a significant increase in use of all Apple devices.

I caught up with MacStadium CEO Ken Tacelli to get some insight into the data, which was captured by Censuswide. 

Mac adoption in the enterprise

“As the adoption of Apple hardware continues to rise with both consumers and business users, and Apple Silicon is emerging as a secure and energy-efficient option for AI workloads, Apple is turning its sights to the enterprise,” he said in an interview. Among the specifics:

93% of CIOs report increased Apple device usage over the past two years.

45% of CIOs describe their leadership’s view of Macs as a strategic investment, reflecting growing executive-level buy-in.

The top drivers for Apple adoption are security and privacy (59%), employee preference (59%), and hardware performance (54%).

Perhaps most importantly, 65% of CIOs say Macs are easier to manage than Windows or Linux devices.

In addition to those factors, the unique technical capabilities of Apple’s kit (53%) play a role. Businesses are buying Macs because they’re cheaper to run, last longer, allow employees to be more productive, and are both more private and more secure.

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The survey also shows that AI has become a leading reason to choose Macs. Apple Silicon is highly performant and energy efficient, enabling Macs to run on-device, secure AI, and to access cloud-based AI services. 

That advantage is driving what MacStadium calls “unprecedented” Mac adoption in enterprise environments. The survey confirms that more than 90% of America’s CIOs agree that Apple Silicon is influencing their decision to adopt Macs across their business.

Among organizations using Macs, 73% rely on them for AI processing, surpassing traditional workloads like iOS/macOS development (68%) and build/test/deploy workflows (61%).

Considering this, it’s perhaps unsurprising that most (99%) respondents say Apple technologies are important to their IT strategy. Over a fifth (22%) say they’re mission-critical, while 71% say they’re very important. (That compares to just 1% who say they’re not important.)

Fixing the weak spots

All the same, the Apple ecosystem still has some weak spots in comparison to the enterprise incumbent, Tacelli told me. “While there are tools to manage Apple endpoints on an enterprise scale, the Apple ecosystem still lacks the robust operational frameworks that Microsoft and Linux have had for years,” he said. 

The survey reveals a few pain points in Mac deployment, with a need to fix some of the security and compliance gaps being the main challenges. Integration with existing software also remains a problem.

Perhaps the need to support legacy solutions slows Apple adoption, given so many of those systems were not made with interoperability or the need to support multi-platform enterprise environments in mind. However, stumbling blocks like these can only fade over time as those systems are replaced.

Back to the future

“We believe ‘MacOps’ is emerging within enterprise IT, signifying a profound shift in the management of Apple devices – a systematic application of DevOps principles to the end-to-end lifecycle of the entire Apple ecosystem, including macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and visionOS,” Tacelli said.“A MacOps framework is designed to manage Apple devices at scale with automation, consistency, security, and speed. It moves beyond the traditional, reactive model of IT support to a proactive, code-driven paradigm where the entire Apple fleet is treated as a managed, version-controlled component of the enterprise infrastructure.”

The advantage of this emerging approach is that it helps resolve the staffing challenges of Apple support. “IT admins well-versed in Microsoft are widely available, but knowledgeable Apple administrators are harder to come by,” Tacelli said. 

The idea is that an effective MacOps framework should make it much easier to deploy Apple hardware and software across any business. There’s some substance to those claims; the survey shows 69% of CIOs would be even more willing to deploy Macs if an enterprise-ready solution for managing them as infrastructure were available.

One more thing

Change comes in waves. It wasn’t so long ago that the very notion of Apple’s devices being widely used in business would have seen proponents laughed out of town. This has changed dramatically, with Apple investing deeply in iterative improvements to what it offers the enterprise. As with offering Apple Business Essentials outside the US, it appears that Apple’s teams are working to ease every pain point they can to encourage enterprise adoption of its platforms.

It’s just that as deployment accelerates, the nature and number of challenges that must be resolved also grows.

So, what happens next? Here’s a prediction: MacOps will one day become so much part of life no one will remember when Apple was almost invisible in business.

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