How Many Devices per IT Admin Can Your Team Handle?

The device-to-administrator ratio is increasingly a benchmark for efficient operations, especially in the retail, hospitality, and restaurant industries, where edge device fleets are expanding fast, and the number of devices per admin is rising. But let’s get one thing out of the way: no universal “ideal ratio” exists. Any number you see floating around is basically a guess unless it accounts for your exact device mix, workflows, staffing model, and operational realities. 

Are you managing static digital signage or a fleet of mobile POS handhelds? Do you support kiosks across 800 stores or tablets inside a single hospital? Are devices online 24/7? Do customers interact with them, or just employees? Your answers fundamentally reshape what “efficient” looks like.

Instead of chasing a magic number, use this framework to evaluate your device management burden — and understand what’s truly holding you back from scaling your fleet sustainably (not just until something breaks).

How do use cases affect your IT management burden?

Put simply, the way the devices you manage are used is the single greatest factor influencing your device management burden. If you’re managing a fleet of passive display signage mixed in with a few mobile POS handhelds, for example, you can support a higher number of devices per administrator — as it’s unlikely display signage will need much active management or experience a business-disrupting outrage.

Use cases with (relatively) low device management burden, and a higher device per admin ratio:

• Digital display signage
• Kitchen display systems
• BYOD employee smartphones
• IoT devices like sensors
• Digital information kiosks

Use cases with moderate device management burden, moderate device-per-admin ratio:

• COPE devices (employee corporate laptops and phones)
• Gaming and amusement devices
• POS devices
• Self-ordering kiosks

Use cases with a high device management burden, lower device-per-admin ratio:

• Patient check-in kiosks
• Connected medical devices
• Robotics (logistics, retail, hospitality)
• Manufacturing and logistics edge AI devices

The next step is to determine what your mix of the above use cases is. Does your fleet lean heavily on relatively hands-off use cases as shown in the low device management burden category? Then you can likely support a higher device per admin ratio.

But as you can see, use cases tend to share some alignment with industry or segment — devices in the medical space, for example, tend to be extremely burdensome on IT staff because of the high-stakes and human-driven nature of the use case. If a patient check-in kiosk goes down or a monitoring peripheral won’t connect, a resolution is needed swiftly — perhaps requiring even dedicated on-site staff. The same goes for critical manufacturing systems that demand extreme reliability and uptime, perhaps 24 hours a day. Thus, more staff are needed to support these devices on a proportional basis.

How distributed and mobile are your devices?

This is a pretty straightforward factor to assess: How many geographic locations do your managed devices live in? If they all exist within a single building, or at least a single highly localized site (e.g., one place of business, like a university or a hospital), you have a very low device distribution burden. That also means you’re more likely to have on-demand physical access to any one device.

If you’re dealing with devices spread across a wider region, your distribution burden increases. In the most extreme cases, some teams manage tens of thousands of devices across an entire continent — in hundreds or thousands of individual locations. Such a highly distributed fleet carries a commensurately immense burden.

Another factor to consider on the spectrum of distribution is mobility — if all of your devices exist at fixed points (or at least never leave a particular building), your need to manage their physical presence is low. If you’re dealing with highly mobile devices (like in-vehicle tablets), it’s very important to spend some of your bandwidth ensuring those devices remain accounted for on a regular basis, and managing the resulting exceptions.

Edge fleet operating systems: Single OS, or a mix?

Mixed OS fleets are increasingly common — many enterprises are running a combination of platforms depending on their specific use case and needs. You may see businesses run Linux for display signage, Android for inventory handhelds, Windows for kiosks, and iOS for mobile POS.

Flexible and scalable: Android 

Generally considered the most scalable platform to manage in 2025 because of the large number of developers and vendors now building on it. Android devices are designed to be managed, in many respects, and can be highly flexible to meet specific requirements, up to and including completely custom use cases and management implementations. However, mixing versions of Android and device vendors can quickly introduce complications and raise your device OS management burden.

Most consistent and streamlined: iOS 

The gold standard for guaranteeing a unified device management experience — if you go all in on Apple’s platform, you’ll be able to manage every device in your fleet in a highly consistent way. Granted, this does tend to come with notable limitations (no real customization, single source OEM, few device form factors).

Best for legacy use cases, good scalability: Windows 

Windows is a common choice in many legacy use cases or when working with AIO vendors. It’s highly supported within many device management platforms, but may be complicated to manage for emerging uses like edge AI, and largely unsuitable for mobility use cases of any kind. Supporting legacy systems (Windows 10 and older) is also soon going to become in effect impossible, as Microsoft is now ending support for those devices.

Infinitely flexible, challenging to scale: Linux 

A strong fit in bespoke or highly specialized uses, and is now the platform of choice for most edge AI devices. But managing Linux without a real strategy can quickly become a headache, and many tools don’t support any management of Linux devices at all (some people may even tell your Linux device management is an oxymoron).

Mixed fleets: The emerging reality

The likelihood you are managing devices under a single operating system is lower and lower with every passing year. Going “all in” on a single platform rarely makes sense for highly-scaled businesses like quick service restaurants, big box retail, and national hospitality brands. And while mixed fleets may lead to better business outcomes, superior device experiences, and more controllable hardware costs, they invariably become complicated to manage.

How To Reduce Your Device Management Burden (While Raising Your Device-to-Admin Ratio)

Once you’ve conducted a device management burden assessment, it’s time to develop solutions to reduce that burden with targeted strategies. Some of these may be very human-driven, like ensuring your staff is appropriately cross-trained to support devices outside their day-to-day workflows in the event of a major incident. Others will be more technical, like selecting management tooling that actually addresses your greatest pain points. Here are some of the ways you can approach common bottlenecks when seeking to maximize your (sustainable!) device-to-admin ratio.

Complex mix of use cases: Scale your strategies with device blueprints and proactive management

IT teams are being asked to support a broader set of device use cases — and that means more documentation, more training, and more incident response processes to create, implement, and maintain. The more you can do to ease that burden, the more you can ease the pain of this inevitable scope creep.

Look for device management tooling that offers clear promises on how you can support a complex array of deployment and content policies, and enables proactive, rather than reactive management. You should be able to define every device configuration from a single pane of glass, and turn device configuration into a hands-off affair. Device configurations should include proactive alerts and self-heal in the event of tampering or drift. Once these blueprints and processes are defined, they should require very little maintenance to sustain, making introducing new use cases a repeatable and highly scalable motion.

Distributed fleets and high-touch support: Achieve true remote access and debugging

Supporting devices across an entire state or region is a thankless and intimidating task. Similarly, if you work in the medical, manufacturing, or logistics spaces, a single device misbehaving in the field can completely take over a day for your staff — pulling them off the real work your team is doing to make a difference. This problem is compounded when remote accessibility isn’t an option, or you’re limited to a “view only” support mode.

Seek out management tooling that can give you real remote access. Full remote control over a secure connection, and even remote debugging over SSH, can shave hours or days off resolution. When incidents can be closed out reliably without needing boots on the ground, you gain confidence that scaling up your device count won’t lead to never-ending ticket triage.

Extreme device counts: Automate device provisioning

Some industries like quick service restaurants and retail require truly immense device counts, especially those businesses operating at national or multinational scale. New location openings are a never-ending task, and initial device kitting and provisioning can take days or weeks to push through — meaning staff spend long hours on highly monotonous tasks that take them off more complex and long-term initiatives.

Automating device provisioning is absolutely achievable — with the right tool. A good device management platform should provide a pathway to truly “plug and play” initial device setup, reducing your kitting and provisioning process to simply unboxing and powering on, then stepping away. This kind of automation may sound like the stuff of fantasy, but it’s possible.

Mixed OS fleets: Create a sightline to unified management

When it comes to mixed fleets, running multiple device management platforms is — for now — often unavoidable. Whether you’re supporting Windows devices on a legacy MDM or running an in-house solution to manage your Linux edge devices, those platforms won’t be a good fit for Android or iOS. There’s no real escaping that. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start looking ahead.

Real, ‘single pane of glass’ management for devices running a variety of operating systems is achievable today. But more importantly, it’s something you can build toward achieving tomorrow. And if you have a way to get there, the potential efficiency impact could be massive — and incremental, if you develop a clear plan to transition your fleet step by step (for example, as old hardware is phased out).

Other ways to enable sustainable device to admin growth

Almost every organization could benefit from new ways to look at making device growth more sustainable for IT and operations staff. The impact of each is going to vary by the factors we discussed — use case, form factor, distribution, OS, device count, etc. — but they’re all worth investigating:

• Geofencing: Receiving alerts when devices aren’t where they’re supposed to be (versus regularly checking that they are) is a straightforward way to reduce the attention burden for admins.
• Device health alerts: If a device loses a peripheral connection, runs low on battery, or overheats, you can take action before a user has to escalate to an issue (and potentially, solve problems before they become widespread). Build a device health strategy to determine which factors matter for you.
• Staged deployments: Sending out content and configuration updates in controlled test groups with a set of defined success conditions increases the robustness and reliability of your update strategy, while greatly reducing the likelihood you’ll need to conduct a manual rollback because of a botched deployment.
• On-platform device grouping: It’s important to maintain and sanitize your devices with clear naming and grouping conventions. If you’re still keeping this stuff in a spreadsheet and not directly on your device management interface, you’re bottlenecking your fleet’s ability to scale.
• Integrations with your enterprise workflows: If you don’t have access to your devices or device management at the API and SDK level, you’re not able to configure those systems in the ways that best interface with your own internal tooling and processes. Giving your support staff built-in access for functions like device reboot, remote view (or control), and content resynchronization directly inside your support platform can be game-changers.

Ever-Greater Device Counts Shouldn’t Be a Source of Pain

Increasing your device-per-admin ratio isn’t about squeezing more out of your team — it’s about removing friction so your admins can stay focused on the work that drives long-term impact. Yes, reporting a higher ratio looks great to leadership. But the real win is giving IT and ops the breathing room to focus on the initiatives that actually transform your business: Whether it’s delivering on customer experience, productivity, or digitalization, these are the initiatives that demand continuous and focused commitment. And defining a clear strategy for reducing the burden of device management is absolutely essential to realizing them.