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My company is running a fleet 200-ish iOS devices which are assigned to managers and executives.

We heavily rely on Find my iPhone/iPad to, well, find lost devices when needed.

Our network spans more than 150 offices around the country and some of them don't have (or can't have) internet access so that the device can communicate freely with the service.

Is there any way of routing the service through the company headquarters (all offices are P2P connected to HQ and HQ has unrestricted access to the service) so that we don't have to open offices to the internet?

Thanks in advance!

Edit: I forgot to mention that the network on each of the offices is automatically routed to HQ, so there's no need for VPN in that case.

What I'm asking is how can it be possibly configured so that an internal service exchanges traffic between iCloud and the devices.

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Why do you give them smartphones if they can't access the internet? – Gerry Apr 9 '12 at 16:49
Internal enterprise applications for management purposes that connect to internal enterprise servers. – Nico Apr 9 '12 at 17:43

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There are solutions for this. A good number of our clients use a Junos VPN portal for telecommuting associates. Meanwhile, Junos provides a free iOS VPN client that integrates very nicely with the on-device OS. Though I'm not aware of other VPN products (it's not my side of the business) I'm reasonably certain there are other products with similar functionality.

My solution would be to set up the VPN, then allow a specific rule to go back out to the iCloud service. If you're dead-set on using iCloud to monitor location, that's probably your best option. Apple Configurator does not currently allow for supervising a device's location, but I wouldn't be surprised if they added it for supervised devices in the future.

Another alternative would be to check out the available documentation from Apple to see if there's a specific feature for your use-case.

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Thanks for the answer, I added some clarifications to my original question. The remote offices are linked via point to point networks and the wi-fi network at those remote offices is the same as the one at HQ, so no VPN is needed. – Nico Apr 9 '12 at 18:13
It sounds like you'll have to get a DNS set up at HQ to route the traffic through to the iCloud servers. The devices are going to have to communicate with them somehow... – zwerdlds Apr 9 '12 at 18:22
Exactly. Do I need to setup some kind of internal service that does the exchange or just the fact of resolving here to HQ and from HQ to iCloud will suffice? – Nico Apr 9 '12 at 18:31
As long as the server resolves and traffic gets piped accordingly, it should be fine. You'll need to check with your network admin about the topology to see if the traffic will be routed correctly. – zwerdlds Apr 9 '12 at 18:42
Ok, I'll check and report back! – Nico Apr 9 '12 at 19:16

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