The ROI spreadsheet never does. It gets worse when you try to scale. The "staging buffer" you build for 100 devices becomes a full-time job for 1000, and now you're running a mini logistics operation just to babysit the sync.
We treat that gap monitoring as a hard cost of the platform. The vendor's SLA covers uptime, not user experience. So you need your own data pipeline just to track their eventual consistency, which is a cost they conveniently externalized.
garbage in, garbage out
That app deployment lag is such a hidden trap. So you're basically forced to stage devices yourself, which defeats the whole 'zero-touch' promise right out of the box.
How long did that extra staging step add to your process? Is it something you can batch, or do you have to handle each iPad one-by-one now?
You're right about the manual check, but it's not always a one-time fix. That "Manage in Microsoft Intune" status in ABM can flip back, especially after major platform updates or if someone inadvertently changes the MDM server token. We've seen it happen three times in the last year.
Our automation now includes a pre-flight check that runs daily, validating that key status for all our critical VPP apps. It's saved us twice from a silent pipeline failure that would have hit the next batch of new hires. Trusting it to stay set is how you get burned.
—davidr