2024 UNC CAUSE

As both IT Support and Apple Systems teams looked to improve processes, we identified an area where automation could improve regular and manual tasks. Support staff were consistently spending time on tasks such as wiping and reprovisioning Apple devices, when offboarding they would be removing those devices from internal management systems, and when a device was reported lost or stolen we had a very manual and complex process for ensuring the device was locked. Using the Jira Assets for a centralized asset database and triggering automations from state changes, we could send http requests to some kind of endpoint for taking action. We initially explored using Jira for the whole process and also explored standing up our own web server to receive http requests, but settled on Azure Functions as a simpler solution with the flexibility of taking individualized requests. We utilize powershell code with Azure Functions to make calls to Jamf Pro for taking action on Apple devices, although this could be any service we want that has an API. We did have some issues with training staff on new processes. Other challenges included working with services that don’t have proper API calls and security and access considerations when blending cloud services such as Azure with on-prem services such as Jira Assets. The goal is to reduce the burden on IT Support Staff and to bring a device into a refreshed or offboarded state more quickly and efficiently. Future plans are to extend to Windows.