A Guide to Choosing a Unified Endpoint Management Solution

The complexity of many organizations’ information technology ecosystems only continues to grow. As the impact of COVID-19 becomes more permanent, its influence on the global workforce has resulted in a need for an adaptable, remote IT infrastructure for businesses across every industry. Given this intensive technical requirement, it is also increasingly critical for companies to maintain visibility and maximum control over all of their digital assets. 

For IT teams at small to medium sized organizations, monitoring this technology constantly can quickly become overwhelming. The time-consuming nature of this work rapidly multiplies if employees have multiple work devices, which has become especially common in the newly remote digital-age. As of last year, Gartner projected that an estimated 5.8 billion enterprise endpoints would be in use for daily business operations, and this number is only expected to exponentially grow as the capabilities of technology evolve. 

By employing endpoint management solutions to oversee and unify all of their devices, organizations can reduce IT costs, reallocate valuable resources and better manage their security risks to minimize the possibility of a data breach and resulting litigation.

What is a unified endpoint management solution?

Gartner defines a  unified endpoint management technology, also known as UEM, as a solution deployed on endpoint devices to detect malicious activity and provide the investigation and remediation capabilities needed to respond to dynamic security incidents and alerts. This technology can be used for managing mobile IT environments, monitoring user activity and regular endpoint maintenance.

UEM technology is becoming increasingly popular across organizations as more companies realize the utilization of these solutions provides them with a growing competitive advantage against their competitors. Forrester predicted that by the end of 2020, 80% of organizations will leverage artificial intelligence or cognitive computing like UEM to analyze their enterprise endpoints. 

By failing to employ a UEM that matches the needs of your organization, your team risks not only wasted resources and security breaches, but also lagging behind competitors in innovation across all operations. 

How to select a UEM vendor

With a large variety of UEM options on the market, it can become a challenge for organizations to identify which technologies will have the most impact on their bottom line. 

When it comes to determining the full return on investment you can expect from employing a UEM, Security Intelligence has warned that many companies experience tunnel-vision and focus only on the capital required to invest in this technology. Instead, experts recommend that organizations carefully consider the human capital currently being wasted on their endpoint management processes. By identifying the time spent deploying and configuring tech, auditing and updating devices and resolving support tickets across the organization, your organization will gain a fuller understanding of which inefficiencies a UEM should address.

The support tasks required to manually oversee enterprise endpoints not only remove the potential autonomy of end-users, but it also reduces their overall productivity as well as your IT team’s. ZenDesk has found that of the almost 500 help tickets internal IT teams can expect to receive every month, it typically takes staff a full 24 hours to initially respond. 

When selecting a UEM provider, ensure that it offers the scalability to grow alongside your organization’s needs and to alleviate the pressure put on your support team. 

Additional security

How secure is your data? In Syntonic’s Employer Report, experts found that 87% of companies relied on their employees using personal devices to regularly access business apps.

As more organizations move toward cloud storage for sensitive data, breaches in employees’ personal devices even when they are not actively working could result in a major security problem. Although bring-your-own-device policies are popular and have even become a necessary function of supporting staff remotely, they introduce a significant risk to your company.

The UEM your company utilizes should allow for user-friendly monitoring across heterogeneous device environments, as otherwise the technology will not be useful within the context of today’s digital world.

Centralized UEM technology

Faronics’ Deep Freeze software is a unified management tool that combines the most effective endpoint security offerings into one centralized platform, assisting IT teams by shoring up their defenses, streamlining their administrative tasks and preserving the functionality of every workstation in their network.

Our Deep Freeze software protects endpoints by freezing a snapshot of a device’s desired configuration and settings as defined by your administrators. With an instant reboot, any unwelcome or unwanted changes are removed from the system, meaning your team can get back to work immediately without requiring intervention from IT.

To learn more about how Faronics’ Deep Freeze technology can help your organization, browse our website or start a free trial today.