Selfhost vs Jamf Cloud.....Thoughts?

[TJ_Edgerly]

Hello all,

We are looking at the possibility of moving our on prem instance to Jamf Cloud. I was wondering if anyone out there has any input on the good, the bad and/or the ugly. Our core IT department is only 4 people, so the appeal of Jamf handling updates and less hardware is appealing.

Currently we have around 1500 Macs and 500 iOS devices. Devices are connected to AC wireless or Gigabit Ethernet. Our ISP is a 2Gig connection.

We would still keep an on prem DP for faster local downloads and leverage the cloud host as a secondary/off campus DP.

Any thoughts or stories about making the switch?

[chriscollins]

If you don't have the time to manage all that yourself as effectively as you'd like then I think you probably answered your own question :)

For us, we still technically host ourselves but we moved everything into AWS so we get benefits of not being on-prem but we maintain the control we want.

[Asnyder]

We still host on prem. because of the price discount. We have about the same amount of devices as you (1200, 200 plus some pc's) (testing ipad management now but unsure if it's worth the extra $1400). My jss is also my dp and it's all running on an hp dl380 g6 running ubuntu 14.04 so it's nothing fancy. Only two members on our IT team and both of us between 4 buildings. Our down/up speed is 300mbps but having the jss internally make's it nice. We don't have a dmz setup though and just use nat'ing for everything on our firewall. Cisco switches with a 10g backbone and ruckus wireless works well for us. I'm curious as to what has you worried update wise? If I want to upgrade our jss I can simply vpn in from my phone and do it in a few seconds. Maintaining hardware I do understand though. I also like the added benefit of being able to use my jss as a file server for anything I want and being able to cURL things from it like dynamic class lists for lanschool. I've found with a small staff if you put the extra time in to automate things now it'll help a ton in the future.

[rderewianko]

For us, it's also a security factor. There's alot of data on there that we'd prefer to have full control over, and keep within our eco system..

We also benefit from a few other customizations, such as a custom SLO page when our users logout of self service.