Many employees’ move to the home office has made the control and management of end devices more demanding for IT departments and initiated some developments that are changing endpoint management permanently.
Adaptiva explains what they are and how they affect businesses. Check out our guide on a list of things needed to start a business.
An unprecedented wave of digitization has rolled in over the past few months, which has significantly affected the digital workplace.
Many companies have purchased mobile devices and introduced new cloud services to enable their employees to work from home. As a result, they have presented their IT departments with a number of challenges because they can no longer access all computers as easily as before.
The home office, therefore, also makes it necessary to modernize endpoint management.
Adaptiva, a provider of endpoint management and security solutions, identifies key trends in endpoint management and explains how they are changing businesses and influencing IT teams’ work.
These 4 Trends are driving Big Changes in Unified Endpoint Management
1. The home office is here to stay.
Even if the home office was born out of necessity in many places, it has firmly established itself in everyday business life and will remain with most companies after the Coronavirus pandemic.
Employees appreciate the flexibility, and even managers who have long been critical of working from home have now found pleasure in it. For IT departments, this means that they urgently need solutions with which they can address employees’ computers, even if they are not connected to the company network.
Since the devices are unlikely to return to the company in the near future, they must be able to adjust configurations remotely and distribute updates and patches reliably flexibly.
2. Cloud services are replacing software.
With the home office, companies have also introduced new cloud services that support communication and collaboration among a distributed workforce. This trend will continue in the months and years to come, as cloud services offer a lot of flexibility and require little administration.
They will often replace locally installed applications and simplify endpoint management because IT departments only have to maintain a basic lean system.
In return, however, they should invest more time in the selection of cloud services so that they meet the highest security and data protection standards and offer interfaces that allow integration into other cloud offerings and corporate applications.
3. Companies are modernizing the digital workplace.
With the acquisition of mobile devices for homework and the switch to cloud services, companies have started to modernize their digital workplaces, which is trend-setting.
In principle, they determine how their employees will work and exchange ideas in the next few years – an excellent opportunity to put internal processes to the test and digitize work processes.
When selecting applications and cloud services for the future, companies should definitely consider their employees’ wishes and needs; otherwise, they run the risk of the modern workplace not being fully adopted and shadow IT with alternative cloud services being created.
4. Employees are increasingly using personal devices.
Because many companies still lacked mobile devices in the early days of Corona, some employees worked at home with their personal devices.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) became Use Your Own Device (UYOD) – something that will increase as cloud services spread.
Depending on where employees are, they use the device they have at hand: from company notebooks to private tablets to smartphones that belong to the company but can be used privately (COPE, Company Owned, Personally Enabled).
This should also be reflected in endpoint management, which has to carry out a basic compliance check on personal devices. If a current virus scanner is installed and, in particular, the browser is up to date, adequate necessary protection is ensured.