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Self-healing Endpoints : Tackle Mundane IT Issues Before They Become Support Tickets

IT departments are dealing with a threat they haven’t faced in the past: An influx of nearly constant and unrelenting change that creates potentially overwhelming management overhead. Employees may jump between multiple PCs, accounts and locations within a matter of a week, let alone their time at a company. Organizations can’t afford to run into security or operational risk because differences in how each device is configured leaves users facing problems. This situation can result in overwhelming workloads on the help desk team as engineers work to manually reconfigure end-user devices over and over again based on day-to-day operational demands. Being able to quickly reboot a system and restore correct settings can ease the burden for all parties, and creating self-healing endpoints, IT admins can resolve many problems that arise.

The Scale of the Endpoint Control Problem

As employees work in varied locations and move between devices, it’s easy for them to run into problems. An executive brings a laptop to a branch office and finds printing to be impossible. A sales worker can’t access the VPN service when coming back from the field because of a small configuration change in the office. Help desk users can be inundated with simple questions ranging from “Why can’t I log in to this app?” to “I’m getting the blue screen of death, what should I do?”

These issues frustrate users and help desk workers alike. End users face productivity pressure, making even a small error a major roadblock. IT teams are rarely thrilled about putting their specialized skills and training to work solving tedious, menial problems instead of focusing on innovative projects.

In many cases, these types of device problems arise because of small changes that can happen over the life cycle of a PC. Whether the settings or location of the device changes or the actual IT configuration goes through a shift, even a small tweak can lead to a cascade of help desk tickets. The rise of digital technologies is leading to an influx of change when it comes to tech use in the modern enterprise, and the result is a nearly constant spate of endpoint security alerts that must be dealt with.

Weak Endpoint Control Increases Help Desk Calls

The Ponemon Cost of Insecure Endpoints Benchmark Study, which was commissioned by Absolute, found that weak endpoint controls represent the leading cause of help desk calls. This creates an environment in which most help desks get nearly 615 endpoint alerts per week, with only 45 percent being reliable.

This new technology climate is leaving businesses with poor visibility into endpoints and management overhead that makes manual help desk processes prohibitive. Respondents to the study said they spend an average of 1,156 hours weekly to detect and contain insecure endpoints. Some of that time is going to tedious manual work, such as resetting VPNs, but much of it is wasted completely chasing after false alerts. It’s time for help desk inefficiencies to disappear. Organizations need better tools to establish, enforce and automate endpoint settings throughout the configuration.

After researching the scale of endpoint visibility problems, Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, explained that companies must eliminate the manual processes that make it impossible to keep up with the scale of device management challenges.

“At the Ponemon Institute, we’ve followed the endpoint security industry closely for more than a decade. It’s clear that enterprises face real visibility and control challenges when it comes to protecting the data on corporate endpoints, ensuring compliance and keeping up with threats,” said Ponemon. “Enterprises need an automated approach to give IT pros visibility into endpoint security health and to better understand risk exposure, ensure compliance and improve visibility.” Self-healing endpoints can help in such situations.

Rethinking Support to Ramp Up Endpoint Control

Businesses are beginning to increase their focus on IT helpdesk automation as they work to deal with the wave of devices hitting enterprise networks.

Half-Cooked Research Reports found that the global market for help desk automation solutions is set for rapid growth due to the way that increased use of personal devices is impacting the enterprise. Organizations are facing a high volume of support tickets and need to remediate them with minimal human intervention.

Improving the help desk is critical, but it is only the start. Companies must also take action to gain greater control of endpoints so they can prevent problems before they take hold. This is where self-healing devices come in.

Preventing Support Tickets in the First Place

Improving help desk efficiency can be achieved by eliminating the device management overhead that IT teams have to deal with. Solutions that create policies for device use and configuration, automatically enforce those settings on endpoints accessing the corporate network and alert IT of non-compliance can resolve many of the device-related issues businesses are facing.

With self-healing endpoints, compliance regulation is simplified and organizations can set effective policies and actually enforce them. What’s more, by packing the technology in visible device management systems, users know the system is installed and will manage parts of the device for them, eliminating any ethical concerns about IT controlling systems it doesn’t own.

Faronics Deep Freeze’s patented technology allows for one such solution. By automating endpoint management, standardization and policy compliance, the technology helps create self-healing endpoints, that can restore themselves back to a pristine state themselves if things goes wrong. These self-healing endpoints help eliminate swathes of basic help desk issues, creating the kind of automated environment that drives efficiency in increasingly complex IT settings.

Want to learn more? This resource provides additional information on how Deep Freeze helps reduce IT tickets.

About The Author

Suzannah Hastings

Suzannah is interested in all things digital, from software security to the latest technological advances. She writes about ways in which the increasingly internet-driven landscape and windows technologies like steady state alternative that change our lives, and what we can expect in the future.

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