22-Dec-2018 11:52 AM
Posted by Prashanth G J, CEO, Technobind
Employee
experience Vs corporate data protection was a tricky, time-consuming debate
when BYOD emerged as a concept. Over the years, many CISOs and CIOs have woken
up to the fact that ‘restriction’ is a futile exercise. They instead worked on ensuring
security, while also giving their employees the freedom to choose.
But the BYOD
conundrum is still a reality with close to 40 percent organizations not
adopting a formal BYOD policy. This simply means that the number of mobile
devices that access the corporate networks keeps growing and a lot of
organizations are not doing much to secure or manage this huge populace of
devices.
BYOD is however
just one side of the endpoint management story. The proliferation of IoT
devices is making endpoint management a literal nightmare for organizations. A
critical 46 percent of IT executives report to experiencing security incidents
related to attacks on IoT devices, says IDC. This even includes those network-connected
devices we have at our homes.
In the near
future, we shouldn’t be surprised if an employee’s refrigerator launches
coordinated attacks on a corporate network!
Cyber security isn’t the only problem either. How do organizations effectively provision, manage and service all of these network-connected devices? That’s why an increasing number of organizations are putting the spotlight back on ‘endpoint management’.
Too many devices, too many tools…
Excess of
network-connected devices led to excess of tools to manage those devices! According
to a SANS report, 83 percent of organizations use between three and nine
different endpoint management tools just to find and patch vulnerabilities on
endpoints. The major reason for this is the heterogeneous nature of the
endpoints in our environments. They run multiple operating systems and are
spread across geographies.
Ensuring that
these endpoints meet the compliance and regulatory requirements is another critical
challenge.
Even those
organizations, that have been effectively cutting down the number of tools,
still have to maintain a minimum of three different management consoles-- one for
desktops and laptops, another for mobile devices, and yet another for printers,
projectors, personally owned BYO devices, gateways and IoT devices.
With too many
tools to manage the endpoints, organizations often struggle with cost and
complexity. Apart from the cost of purchasing, deploying and managing these disparate
tools, one has to master the art of managing so many vendor relationships to
survive!
The
associated infrastructure too brings in huge operational expenses. The results
however don’t justify the kind of money, time and resource being spent on endpoint
management.
Still not good enough
Even with all
the tools, organization still struggle with inadequate visibility to their
endpoint landscape. A significantly large number of security professionals
admit to not having complete insights or visibility about the devices connected
to their network. This even includes the corporate owned devices!
Besides,
endpoint management is still largely driven by manual process, thanks to the
siloed nature of these point tools. I can’t stress enough the importance of
automation in endpoint management at this stage!
Organizations
are also challenged with inefficient compliance enforcement on the endpoints
due to lack of integration among these tools. As the number of tools increased,
IT teams also struggled with lack of ability to respond in a timely and agile
manner.
One tool, multiple benefits
Imagine
managing and controlling all the corporate assets from a single console! That’s
exactly what Unified endpoint management promises. UEM is fast becoming a preferred
option for organizations that have been grappling with endpoint management
woes. It provides a holistic view of all the connected devices on the network,
while automating manual tasks that were consuming a lot of resources and time.
The biggest
advantage organizations see here is better data/device security and improved
compliance enforcement. Not just that, organizations will finally be able to
create a consistent user experience across device types, simplify the overall
endpoint management and have better control over the assets.
We have had
first hand experience of this shift in the market, with many of our customers already
kick-starting new projects on unified endpoint management.
More and more
devices will continue to get connected to the networks, and it’s important that
the endpoint management solution you choose can be scaled seamlessly to address
the future requirements. Thankfully, we have solutions that are future-ready!