Creating Managed Apple IDs for Business: Best Practices

Managed Apple Accounts (MAAs) give businesses centralized control over Apple IDs for employees, keeping personal and business data separate. They improve security, simplify app licensing, and streamline collaboration. 

Best practices include:

• Manage accounts through Apple Business Manager with mobile device management and Apple Automated Device Enrollment.
• Use Box for collaboration alongside MAAs to overcome iCloud’s storage limits.
• Enable federation with identity providers (Microsoft/Google) to simplify logins and strengthen security.

Businesses that rely on Apple devices often run into challenges when employees use personal Apple IDs on company hardware. This creates security risks, licensing issues, and unnecessary IT headaches. Using Managed Apple Accounts solves these problems by giving IT centralized control while keeping personal and business data separate.

Read on to learn what Managed Apple Accounts are, the benefits and limitations, how to create them, and three best practices to get the most from your Apple ecosystem.

What is a Managed Apple Account?

What Are the Advantages of Using Managed Apple Accounts?

Are There Any Drawbacks to Using Managed Apple Accounts?

How Do You Create Managed Apple Accounts?

How Do You Manage and Maintain Managed Apple Accounts?

3 Best Practices for Managed Apple Accounts for Your Business

Implement Managed Apple Accounts with Ease

FAQs about Managed Apple Accounts

What is a Managed Apple ID?

A Managed Apple Account is an Apple ID that your organization creates and manages for its employees. Unlike personal accounts, the business owns and controls them. This allows IT teams to:

• Reset passwords.
• Manage access to Apple services.
• Assign role-based administration.

In short, Managed Apple Accounts give employees secure access to Apple devices without tying anything to their personal email, credit cards, or iCloud data. This separation keeps personal information private while safeguarding company-owned data and devices.

What Are the Advantages of Using Managed Apple Accounts?

Managed Apple Accounts bring clear benefits to both IT teams and end users:

• Centralized user management: Use Apple Business Manager to view, edit, and control all accounts in one place, improving security and oversight.
• Greater flexibility: Enable smoother app distribution, integrate with platforms such as Microsoft or Google for identity management, and improve collaboration across teams.

Are There Any Drawbacks to Using Managed Apple Accounts?

Because Apple prioritizes business security, some consumer features are intentionally disabled for Managed Apple Accounts, including:

• Apple Pay
• Find My (iPhone, Mac, Friends)
• iCloud Mail, Keychain, and Family Sharing
• Purchases from the App Store, Music, TV, or Books (including free apps)
• Paid Apple services, such as News+ or Arcade

While these limitations may remove some conveniences, they also prevent security risks. For example, blocking “Find My” ensures employees can’t accidentally lock company devices to their personal Apple IDs—a feature that protects businesses more than it restricts them.

How Do You Create Managed Apple Accounts?

Creating Managed Apple Accounts for business use is a straightforward process that puts IT administrators in the driver’s seat. The creation of Managed Apple Accounts is handled in Apple Business Manager. Once you've created and verified your Apple Business Manager account, you can create Managed Apple Accounts:

• Manually: Admins have the option to create accounts by hand, providing a personalized approach to user identification that can also be edited at a later time.
• Via domain federation: If your organization uses authentication with Google Drive or Microsoft Azure Active Directory, Managed Apple Accounts can be automatically provisioned from your identity provider.

Wondering how to manage multiple Apple devices for business? Consider leveraging the expertise of Ntiva, a certified Apple managed service provider. Ntiva can help guide your organization through the intricacies of creating and managing Managed Apple Accounts.

How Do You Manage and Maintain Managed Apple Accounts?

For individuals who hold the role of administrator or people manager, there are a few places to begin with customizing these accounts:

• Roles: Assign your users specific roles to give them permission to perform certain tasks within Apple Business Manager. Most of your team should be assigned the "staff" role, but individuals who need to manage certain features can be made different types of managers.
• Access Management: You can also control account access to Apple services via Access Management. Here, you can disable access to certain Apple cloud sites, services, and features to ensure everyone has access to things they need (and nothing they don't).

3 Best Practices for Managed Apple Accounts for Your Business

Technology is constantly evolving, and so should your account management strategy. Here are three practices to keep operations smooth and secure.

Best Practice 1: Manage Apple Accounts through Apple Business Manager.

At present, there are two primary kinds of Apple Accounts: personal and Managed. (Think of these as "consumer" and "corporate.")

As a consumer, you have a personal Apple Account that you use to log in to the App Store to download apps for your Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Every app you download is tied permanently to your Apple Account, so if you install an app with one Apple Account and then you change to a different one, you can have serious problems (especially with paid apps).

If you ever need to update software that was installed with a different personal Apple Account, you'll find that the device won’t let you; you can’t install that update unless you provide the password for the originating Apple Account. To get around this, you'll want to delete the app and install it again using your current personal Apple Account.

This also happens with businesses that pass Apple devices (such as Macs) between employees. Multiple apps on these devices can be attached to different employee consumer Apple Accounts, creating plenty of headaches when it comes to purchasing and patching apps.

As a business, it’s best to manage Apple Accounts through Apple Business Manager. Centrally licensing and deploying App Store apps via a mobile device management (MDM) platform ensures that the apps are licensed to your organization rather than to an unknown mix of personal Apple Accounts. Those licensed apps are then distributed to your Apple devices through their serial number and can be rescinded when you retire those Macs, iPhones, or iPads in the future. With managed Apple Accounts, you can boost Mac security.

This broader control over Apple device lifecycle management is made more profound through Apple Automated Device Enrollment (ADE), which you may know of as "zero-touch deployment." Apple Business Manager can become the trusted hub that helps Apple identify your organization as an entity that owns Apple devices, rather than assuming the device owner is the person whose name was on the purchasing credit card. Utilize ADE workflows to streamline your Apple device procurement, deployment, and offboarding to make the whole process unique to your needs.

The Takeaway: Stop using personal Apple Accounts. Use Managed Apple Accounts through Apple Business Manager, deploy App Store apps centrally via an MDM, and take advantage of ADE.

Best Practice 2: Use Managed Apple Accounts for business and Box for collaboration.

Team members these days do a lot of their collaborating online rather than shoulder to shoulder. Additionally, many collaborate using Apple's iWork productivity suite: Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.

There are only two platforms that support iWork collaboration: iCloud and Box.

iCloud

Your employees are likely already collaborating through iCloud—and they’re probably using personal Apple Accounts that they control. If your staff has Managed Apple Accounts, then your organization has greater control over securing your business and client documents stored in iCloud. Encourage your team to move any company-owned content out of personal Apple Accounts and into their Managed Apple Account storage.

One challenge of leveraging iCloud storage with Managed Apple Accounts is storage limitations. At present, each Apple Account's storage is limited to only 5 GB, with no option to upgrade. This can make sharing larger files and projects with those outside of your team a challenge. Apple is showing signs of making iCloud Drive more business-friendly, but iCloud mainly shines as a personal storage solution at this time.

Box

Apple has worked extensively with Box, the cloud storage and collaboration platform, to integrate cloud-based collaboration into the Apple ecosystem. Box is the only cloud storage platform that allows native Pages, Numbers, and Keynote collaboration via Managed Apple Accounts.

While Managed Apple Accounts for Business have a 5 GB storage limit, Box doesn’t limit storage. It has robust data management tools for your team and the capacity to scale with you.

The Takeaway: If you want to boost collaboration across your teams using Apple iWork apps, adopt Managed Apple Accounts for your users. As you grow, for more business features, greater security, and additional storage, use Box.com.

Best Practice #3: Build trust between Apple and identity providers with federation. 

Federation (or federated authentication) is the process of leveraging an account’s username and password from an identity provider (IdP) to allow access to other external services.

Where your Managed Apple Accounts are concerned, you should use federation to establish trust between Apple Business Manager and your IdP (Microsoft Entra, Google Workspace, or other OIDC-compatible services). As a result, your users can leverage their cloud usernames (email) and passwords as Managed Apple Accounts. When they log into an Apple service, they'll be taken to their familiar, organizational IdP login screen.

They can then use their Microsoft credentials to sign in to their assigned iPad or Mac and even iCloud on the web. In one-to-many deployments, users can also use these federated Apple Accounts to sign in on a shared iPad.

Once you are federated, you have proven to both Apple and your IdP that you own your domain and that only you can create Apple Accounts on your domain.

Apple has made federation easy, but you must federate with a well-thought-out migration path. The benefits are worth your consideration:

• Fewer separate passwords for your users to remember, forget, or lose: This can lead to users maintaining stronger, memorable passwords using your IdP-defined password complexity policies.
• Increased security: If an account is compromised, you can quickly disable access from your IdP to deny access to all associated sites and services in one place.
• Flexibility: Have Apple Business Manager create new accounts for your users only when they try to use an Apple service or create the Managed Apple Account as soon as it is detected in your directory.

The Takeaway: If your organization uses a mix of Apple and Microsoft or Google productivity apps and services, use federation to build trust and simplify authentication and authorization across the two platforms.

Implement Managed Apple Accounts with Ease

To get the most from your Managed Apple Accounts, enroll in Apple Business Manager, consider using Box for collaboration, and build trust between Apple and your identity provider with federated authentication. 

Need help making it all work? Ntiva’s Apple Services team can help you optimize account management, enhance security, and keep your Apple ecosystem running smoothly.

FAQs about Managed Apple Accounts

Do Managed Apple Accounts cost extra?

No. Managed Apple Accounts are included as part of Apple Business Manager, which is free for organizations. Costs may apply if you integrate with MDM platforms or third-party tools, such as Box.

Can employees still use personal Apple IDs on company devices?

Yes, but it’s best to keep work and personal accounts separate. Employees can use personal Apple IDs for their own iCloud or App Store purchases, while Managed Apple Accounts keep company apps and data under IT’s control.

How much storage does a Managed Apple Account include?

Currently, Apple provides 5 GB of iCloud storage per Managed Apple Account with no upgrade path. For larger files or team collaboration, many businesses use Box as a complementary storage solution.

Blog was originally published in February 2024 and updated in November 2025.