The Rise of Unified Endpoint Management – Enabling smart, secure and more productive work spaces wherever you go
By Himanshu Dubey | November 18, 2019
For decades organizations endorsed the workplace which had users accessing tethered, locked down and managed desktop on an office network. However, evolving workforce BYOD strategies and business growth have transformed workplaces into workspaces. The productivity of employees is no longer affiliated to the physical workplace but on flexibility and collaboration which has been unleashed with the digital transformation. Therefore, organizations as part of their digital transformation strategy should accommodate the digital workspace which seamlessly integrates their current organization and builds a mobile workforce.
While workforce transformation is the way forward however organizations must consider new challenges it imposes, maintain secure control of enterprise data, centralized application deployment, lifecycle management and getting insight into security threats and vulnerabilities on devices and networks which they may not even own. The traditional approach of endpoint management and perimeter security cannot solve this problem. Moreover, organizations are encouraging the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) work culture which adds personal devices on a company network, thus the challenge of balancing employee freedom, productivity and secure access to corporate data, becomes even bigger.
The organizations can adopt Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) which can help in the management of modern mobile devices, desktops, applications, and content across the entire organization. A UEM Solution is essentially a combination of multiple mobility management strategies that have evolved over the period. It essentially comprises of mobile device management (MDM), Mobile application management (MAM), Mobile Content Management (MCM), and Mobile identity management (MIM). All these modules manage, configure complete lifecycle and OS platform in the devices, ensuring regular updates, license management along with device and data security on the go.
A carefully designed UEM Strategy can reap enormous benefits for modern enterprises, for instance,
- It allows them to securely enable BYO of all types of devices and keeps personal and corporate data separate on those devices to ensure user privacy, while also protecting corporate data through DLP Policies and conditional access
- It can provide flexibility and freedom of choice to users by enabling a multi-OS environment and allowing users to quickly access enterprise resources
- It enables instant authentication with single sign-on to Public, In-House, SaaS-based or web-based applications
- It can ensure the secure delivery of all their apps via VPN tunneling and app containerization
As modern workplaces evolve to workspaces there won’t be a ubiquitous mobility solution that can be implemented in every organization. Therefore, organizations should analyze their needs by looking at specific aspects based on the type of endpoints, variety of operating systems present in the environment, the type of applications they are using, the assets they want to protect. The key is to start small and test the success of UEM. It is also important to understand that a UEM solution is not a substitute for other endpoint solutions like NAC, UEBA etc. Moreover, it is there to compliment them and play a key role in the overall layered security strategy of a modern enterprise.