Why Enterprise Needs Always-On Endpoint Management
Driving protection, productivity, compliance and optimizing remote work with endpoint management.
Ian Pratt, global head of security for personal systems at HP Inc., discovers the vital role of always-on endpoint management in securing remote workforces and ensuring uninterrupted productivity.
In a world of hybrid work, the endpoint is the new office. If this is where business now takes place, it’s also where threat actors congregate to target employees. That puts pressure on IT teams to ensure they are tracking, securing, and managing devices more effectively—to reduce cyber risk, keep costs under control, and meet a maze of compliance requirements.
It all adds to a significant operational burden for IT when teams are more stretched than ever by skills shortages and efficiency drives. Many companies are looking towards always-on endpoint management to provide the continuous visibility and control they need for a work-from-anywhere world.
The Journey to Even More Distributed Endpoints
New research conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by HP shows that 72% of surveyed companies employ a hybrid model, meaning much of the workforce is remote at any given time. Employees demand a better work-life balance, and they often get what they want in a tight labor market.
This means IT teams must cater to traditional in-office work and a more fluid post-pandemic environment, which can be challenging when managing company and employee-owned devices.
But it’s about to get even more challenging. Some companies are likely to transition to a global digital workspace model as part of their hybrid work strategies. That is a unified platform or environment where all necessary tools, apps, and resources are available for employees to perform their work tasks – can be accessed anywhere in the world.
This will add even greater urgency to endpoint management efforts as the workforce becomes more distributed across time zones and continents. There’s no doubting the business logic behind such a transition: it allows the company to tap a broader pool of talent while reducing turnover and improving productivity. It may require significant investment in the employee experience to deliver the secure, agile, and efficient digital workspaces employees need.
The Problem With Endpoint Management
There are several challenges for IT teams to manage in this context. The first is remote updates. Exploitation of unpatched software remains one of the top three most popular attack vectors. Even if IT teams decide to trust Microsoft when updating the OS and for office applications, less prevalent applications may not have their updated infrastructure, or their IT teams may not want to trust the updates automatically. Given attackers are closely following popular updates and reverse-engineering these to exploit unpatched machines rapidly; it only takes one exposed endpoint for hackers to use as a stepping stone into the corporate network or cloud services.
Both financially motivated cyber-criminals and emboldened nation-state actors prowl for sensitive data and, potentially, critical operations to disrupt. Less-well-protected home networks and insecure public Wi-Fi hotspots increase the risk of compromise. It’s alarming that just two-fifths (42%) of the companies Forrester surveyed perform firmware updates annually, while a third (32%) only update every two years or less.
Then, the risks are associated with lost or stolen devices and laptops. 70% of organizations say that hybrid work has increased this threat. Most fleet management systems have a major blind spot in that endpoints can’t be remotely located, locked, or wiped if they’re not connected to the internet.
Finally, IT has to rely on subpar protection. Half of the IT and security decision-makers have cited inadequate endpoint security solutions as obstacles to addressing security and management challenges.
These challenges demand improved data security and software update mechanisms and enhanced asset management—which is the key to reducing cyber risk, improving resource allocation, and enhancing policy conformance. Maximizing the accuracy of asset databases is cited by over half (55%) of IT and security decision-makers as their top remote endpoint management challenge, alongside data security (60%) and software updates on remote devices (55%).
See More: How Can AI-powered Solutions Enhance Identity Security?
Why Do We Need Always-on Management?
Tackling these challenges is critical to meeting internal audit standards and external regulatory mandates and minimizing the potential for financial and reputational damage stemming from an endpoint incident. For many companies, full-disk encryption is a critical step. But it’s not the only control that they need. Asset management, device backup and restore, automated device recovery processes, BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) update mechanisms, and device location tracking are all essential.
IT leaders need to think carefully about how those capabilities are delivered. Two-thirds (67%) say that ensuring secure communication with remote endpoints is a significant concern for their IT department. This is where always-on fleet management comes into its own. It ensures that software updates and other instructions can be pushed out to all devices and that data flows continuously in the other direction. That way, there are never any delays in securing and optimizing distributed working environments.
Find, lock, and erase solutions that leverage cellular connectivity to ensure always-on management by mitigating risk when devices are not internet-connected or even powered off. Three-quarters of IT leaders believe improved endpoint management like this would positively impact business operations and efficiency. It could enhance data protection, slash downtime, increase employee productivity, improve compliance, and even lower IT costs by reducing PC remediation or replacements. The workplace of tomorrow will arrive faster than many companies think. Better start getting those endpoint management plans in place today.
How always-on endpoint management can enhance your business resilience for seamless remote work? Let us know on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
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