Rethinking MDM: Legacy Tools vs. Today's Needs

What is “Legacy MDM”?

If your MDM still treats every device like a laptop from 2012, it’s legacy. Most do, more often than not because they were built on technology stacks with roots going back well over a decade. But the “legacy MDM” definition has as much to do with the underlying infrastructure as it does fitness to purpose, as these tools were designed for managing devices under a different reality than exists on the ground today. 

Here are some of the hallmarks of a legacy MDM solution:

• Designed for BYOD / COPE use cases, where employee general purpose computing occurs
• Focused on security policy compliance checklists, not content or device behavior
• Limited support for application delivery (user acceptance and/or IT handover still often needed for every device)
• Limited visibility into current device status / compliance (manual checks often needed), no drift management
• Limited ability to define and automate the content / OTA / configuration update process (if at all)
• Limited interface management, most workflows require working in configuration files and/or scripts

Legacy MDM solutions are almost exclusively architected to enable a traditional “BYOD” (bring your own device) or “COPE” (corporate owned, personally enabled) enterprise device use case that emerged in the 2000s and early 2010s. 

For the COPE use case, think employees laptops and PDAs — devices that house sensitive information, but are used generically and tend to be tied to a specific employee. Such systems need to be locked down with settings enforced uniformly across the entire organization. For BYOD, when PDAs started getting phased out for smartphones in the workplace, many employees began demanding the ability to install their enterprise applications and access work accounts on their personal devices. To enable this, ensuring security and policy compliance was job one for IT ops teams — guaranteeing employees actually had secure lockscreens, minimum screen timeouts, and utilized corporate VPNs and 2FA for sensitive data and applications.

The scale and urgency of this new corporate computing reality — devices everywhere all at once, you might say — presented a million very similar nails demanding one very big hammer. That’s where legacy MDM came in: Tools designed to implement monolithic, static configurations across entire families of devices in a “set it and forget it” fashion for an entire organization (so, not very different from the way enterprise workstations were managed). What the legacy MDM approach lacked was any emphasis on visibility, drift management, OTA content deployment, or enabling heterogeneous complexity. Specifically, the kind of challenges that emerge when dealing with dedicated, business critical devices like kiosks, point of sale, and edge IoT.

How Does Legacy MDM Fail Businesses Today?

72% of IT leaders cite challenges with their current MDM provider, and 59% report their teams use over 7 different tools in a given month to manage their organization's mobile devices. This points to a fragmented ecosystem with customers patching together solutions to bridge the shortfalls of various legacy MDM tools. Why?

The reality of device management today is fundamentally different than it was when legacy MDM solutions came onto the market. A simple analogy would be that legacy MDM is a bit like coding every page of your website from scratch in 2025 — it’s hugely wasteful of time and resources, introduces compliance risks, and stifles innovation. Automation, scalability, and reliability are core requirements for any modern enterprise SaaS tool, and yet: Legacy MDM solutions abound.

Here are some of the key use cases legacy MDM solutions are a bad fit for.

• Mixed fleets with dedicated endpoints (different OS, different form factors, different functions)
• Multiple apps requiring regular (daily, weekly, monthly) updates, especially across multiple device groups
• Achieving compliance requirements that demand real-time device visibility (reporting, remote access, remote monitoring)
• Revenue-critical devices (point of sale, kiosk, inventory / logistics handhelds)
• Always-on devices in restaurant, retail, hospitality, healthcare, and field service

And these aren’t just theoretical downsides — any business working with a legacy MDM solution is going to encounter these pain points, and likely on a daily basis. Operating expenses increase, scale becomes harder to achieve, and support tickets constantly escalate. Legacy MDM solutions put enterprises in a permanently reactive posture. 

What Defines Modern MDM?

Fortunately, a new class of MDM is starting to enter the market. MDM designed for the always-on, business-critical device functions modern businesses and enterprises need to achieve success at scale. And, more importantly, to unblock innovation and realize strategic visions. So, what makes a “modern MDM”?

Desired state management

Step one to modern device management is a desired state management approach. Like the similarly-named declarative device management, desired state management looks at compliance as an always-on requirement. Devices out of compliance with policy should self-correct, whether using on-device logic or active intervention via command-and-control check-ins from the cloud (or both). With desired state management, device drift is controlled proactively via automation, taking IT support operations out of the permanently reactive “ticket and fix it” posture legacy MDM imposes.

Continuous device updates

Manual updates on a fixed schedule with zero control over your deployment pipeline are pretty much a given with legacy MDM. You need to update your expectations with modern MDM solutions — app, content, or policy updates can be staged to test or lab groups, then automatically escalate to regional or global deployment when staging conditions are met. You can deliver content directly from your own public or private cloud infrastructure, and get real-time visibility into deployment status.

True visibility and reachability (remote access and control)

If your MDM solution doesn’t provide you remote control for your Android or AOSP devices, you’re firmly living in the past. A modern MDM gives you on-demand device status, remote viewing and control, debugging, and instant configuration updates. Tickets get resolved in minutes, not days or weeks.

Full stack control and deep integration

The days of MDM as a fully abstracted layer above the devices being managed are over. In theory, this made some sense in the past — device management was a monolithic set of configuration lists pushed via console, with little active communication between the management layer and the devices themselves. Today, businesses need access to every lever they can pull to enable automation, agility, and responsiveness. Your devices, the operating system, and your MDM should all work in harmony to reduce deployment times, streamline rollouts, and accelerate your innovation cycle.

Legacy MDM vs. Modern MDM Feature Comparison

Who Benefits from Modern MDM? Who Should Use Legacy MDM?

If your core MDM use case is BYOD or COPE-first — employee smartphones, laptops, corporate workstations — it’s possibly a legacy MDM solution is still meeting your needs. These are commodity-grade tools, and priced as such. But if you’re trying to drive innovation, business outcomes, and operational agility with your devices, legacy MDM solutions are just a bad fit.

Whether you’re an IT operations manager with too many tickets and too little time to work on priority projects, a technology or innovation leader trying to unlock scale, or an executive or compliance officer trying to derisk a strategic move, making the switch to a modern MDM is essential. Even if your legacy MDM provider may tell you they’re capable of meeting your project requirements, there’s a vast chasm between “technically possible” and “realistically achievable (and sustainable).”

How to Move from Legacy MDM to Modern MDM

Switching MDM platforms isn’t a small decision — but it’s always achievable. The key thing to keep in mind is that by moving to a more capable, modern MDM tool, you’re not just unblocking the projects and reducing the overhead that you’re dealing with today. You’re investing in the flexibility and control necessary to stay competitive, agile, and adaptive in an ever-changing world.

No one is going to tell you a large-scale MDM migration is easy, but as a project, it’s relatively straightforward to scope and validate.

1. Audit: Examine your existing fleet composition. Determine which devices are candidates for migration, and which will need to live on your legacy solution until EOLed. Full 1:1 fleet migrations are rarely the reality. Instead, plan to ramp your migration in stages alongside your device replacement cycle.
2. Pilot: Determine the best-fit device in your fleet for an in-place migration. Determine which features are critical to operation, compare MDM capabilities, and create a test workflow for migration (deprovision, factory reset, reprovision, reconfigure). Consider how best to automate the migration workflow.
3. Test and iterate: On your pilot devices, design a new configuration to mirror the legacy MDM configuration. Validate that your modern MDM can replicate the proper device state. From there, start modernizing. What new device behaviors can you control? What known issues can be resolved? How can you accelerate content deployments? Where can steps be removed from provisioning and configuration?
4. Side-by-side: Compare devices in the field. Determine how documenting your new provisioning and configuration process would change versus your current MDM (you should see a BIG reduction in steps). Create test cases for device troubleshooting (reboot device remotely, clear app cache, uninstall latest update package), measure time to deploy content or configuration updates, and demonstrate new device features.
5. Deploy wide: Once your migration is scoped, your MDM pilot successful, your migration workflow validated, and your new configuration created, you’re ready to go wide!

It’s Time to Stop Managing Devices Like It’s 2015

By the time you’ve done the homework and lab-validated the ways a modern MDM can save you time and money, reduce your risk, and tear down blockers to innovation, it should be obvious why switching is a project worth undertaking. It should also be obvious that your competition will end up making a similar assessment sooner or later — for all the same reasons.

As the proliferation of devices in retail, food service, hospitality, and medical settings only accelerates, the need for modern device management is more critical than ever in 2025. If you don’t have a strategy for modernizing your device management, you’re at significant risk of impacting operations, revenue, and expansion. But migration shouldn’t be a scary word, and Esper is here to show you the way. We’ve helped enterprises migrate thousands of devices to our modern MDM solution, accelerating innovation and reducing OpEx. 

Whether you’re an IT operations lead drowning in tickets, an innovator hacking sustainable growth, or an executive who needs to unblock key strategic initiatives, Esper is the MDM that can build the path to the outcome you need. We’d love to know what makes your challenge unique, because we thrive on architecting real solutions for our customers! At Esper, we’re not just another tool in the chain; we’re your trusted technical advisors, experienced solution architects, and bold partners in innovation. Find out why.