UEM: Accelerate Your Digital Transformation With Unified Endpoint Management

Introduction

Midmarket enterprises face a quagmire. They report strong revenue growth and contribute significantly to the economy — providing tens of millions of employment opportunities in the United States alone. 1 Not surprisingly, they also deal with the same modern complexities and technological dependence as larger organizations. However, the resources at midmarket IT organizations' disposal are typically extremely limited.

Midmarket businesses generally have from several hundred to several thousand endpoints under management. Often these endpoints sit in distributed locations and are serviced with a limited IT staff and budget to keep all systems running securely and optimally. Considering they run mission-critical systems across an array of devices operating on a multitude of networks while also trying to meet compliance requirements in an unpredictable and dynamic environment, their task is, to put it mildly, daunting.

Kaseya's 2018 State of IT Operations for Midsize Enterprises found CIOs and IT Directors have an impressive set of digital transformation priorities. The increase in the number of cyberattacks has given IT leaders an easy conversation starter about why their initiatives make a strategic impact to the business itself, starting with data protection and uptime.

However, this is not enough. To stay competitive and to succeed, midmarket enterprises must transform if they are to support agility, scalability and flexibility while maintaining fiscal accountability.

This ebook examines the various challenges midmarket enterprises face in the journey toward digital transformation, describes why there is a need for change, and how Unified Endpoint Management is the key to overcoming hurdles.

Roadblocks to Modern IT

For most midmarket enterprises, obstacles to digital transformation fall into three buckets.

Point Solutions

The debate of adopting point solutions vs. platform solutions might be a never-ending one. However, realistically, point solutions have more cons than pros. While they might provide easy and quick fixes to individual problems, a build up of these solutions over time may cause chaos and lead to IT architecture complexity. Point solutions are rigid, and even best-of-breed tools have limited feature sets. Over time, they become dispensable with the constant change in technology. Most point solutions have integration issues, causing data silos in the IT landscape that hamper growth and scalability. Beyond the complexities of day-to-day usage, these tools quickly become a nightmare during a compliance audit.

Legacy Tools

Legacy systems or applications are the last-generation derivatives of up-market solutions built in the 1990s when endpoints stayed nicely on desktops and didn't move around. Challenges such as a dwindling pool of expertise well-versed with the old technologies and vendors ending support for such tools have made legacy tools difficult and expensive to sustain. While these tools might still function normally, legacy systems become unstable and open to vulnerable attacks due to compatibility issues with modern security procedures and the IT infrastructure as a whole.

Security and Compliance Challenges

IT security and compliance is a big challenge even for large organizations, but midmarket businesses face the same security threats with lower budgets and fewer resources. In the first half of 2018 alone, organizations were flooded with cyberattacks and data breaches with an average cost per compromised record of $148. The mean time to identify a breach was calculated at 197 days and the mean time to contain a breach was 69 days. 2

With the dynamic threat landscape and growing number of endpoints, meeting security and compliance requirements can be costly, complex, and time-consuming. Midmarket enterprises must level up their protection without overwhelming their IT teams and digging into more complexity. The success of a business depends on enabling a modern management approach for IT that simplifies endpoint complexity while providing in-depth security. Unified Endpoint Management delivers that and more.

INTRODUCING UNIFIED ENDPOINT MANAGEMENT

Unified endpoint management (UEM) is an approach to securing and controlling endpoints in a connected, cohesive manner from a single console. Today, many organizations use siloed tools for various endpoint functions. Some IT teams use multiple tools for the single purpose of managing the various aspects of security. UEM breaks down these siloes and reduces operational redundancies by providing centralized access to every endpoint in an organization’s network, eliminating the need to deploy multiple tools for different devices or processes.

In addition to simply providing visibility into your network, UEM aims to increase efficiency and agility in managing and updating endpoints. It leverages automation to streamline and standardize complex IT processes and allows IT to remotely control, change and secure all devices in the network.

BENEFITS OF A UNIFIED APPROACH

Lower Costs

The infrastructure, licensing and management costs of using a single solution is drastically less than the cost of deploying and managing multiple tools. By eliminating point solutions and getting rid of redundant systems, businesses can avoid unnecessary costs, free up budgets, and deploy staff for more strategic purposes. The savings in total cost of ownership that IT can realize from performing various endpoint functions through a single pane of glass is immense.

Reduced IT Complexity

A unified approach goes a long way toward cutting complexity by offering:

Today's modern businesses - from SMBs to global enterprises - consume myriad hardware and software technologies. Managing and optimizing these solutions for business success is complex and requires a level of expertise and technical acumen not easily found. As IT spending shows no signs of slowing and more devices and applications are added to the network each day, it's imperative for companies of all sizes to proactively monitor and manage their IT infrastructure.

IT automation helps standardize processes and streamline deployment procedures with reduced errors. Repetitive tasks are reduced, accuracy improves, and productivity increases. An architectural approach to automation, by consolidating and coordinating processes within a single framework, increases the much-needed IT agility of a growing business and reduces the costs and time expended on managing and supporting multiple solutions.

Improved IT Security

Quite often, unchecked risk factors that remain unmitigated for too long – something that happens in almost all businesses – are the cause for unexpected cyberattacks. Inconsistent policies, unpatched operating systems, badly designed applications and the lack of visibility across assets contribute to the expanding cyberattack surface, allowing hackers to find these weak links and exploit them.

UEM's approach to making an organization secure is through centralization of security. All security functions, from antivirus to encryption and beyond, will be undertaken from a single console. To keep a network secure, IT teams must impose constraints on each and every endpoint. UEM allows them to set these constraints automatically and have complete control over the endpoints.

Scalability to Facilitate Growth

As IT teams shift their planning toward a distributed, cloud-based model, scalability comes into play. Scalability is especially critical for midsize organizations. As they grow, so do the number of endpoints to be managed. And the main driver for UEM is managing an increasing number of endpoints at any given time. It allows you to increase or decrease your infrastructure with your changing business needs without affecting your budget. By providing a highly automated and integrated environment, UEM empowers IT teams to pave the way for an enterprise's much needed digital transformation.

KASEYA'S APPROACH TO UEM

At Kaseya, we have been helping midmarket enterprises take the complexity out of IT for over two decades. We know your success and the success of your business depends on managing IT more effectively, efficiently, and securely. Keeping this in mind enables us to be a customer-first team, working to bring solutions that make the lives of IT leaders around the globe easier and more predictable.

We work with customers in numerous industries, including healthcare, education, financial services, retail, logistics, and manufacturing. The multiple awards we have won for developing solutions and fueling innovation in this space demonstrate our consistent focus in seeking new ways of doing things.

Kaseya provides a UEM platform that combines endpoint and network management, reducing the cost of licensing separate solutions as well as the associated headaches of managing multiple vendor relationships.

With Kaseya's UEM solution, you can:

Command Centrally

You can't effectively support business services that run on systems you can't see. Kaseya delivers visibility into all of your new areas including cloud (e.g., laaS, PaaS, and SaaS) and legacy infrastructure (e.g., computers, network, storage, and clients) and applications. Kaseya's discovery and audit capabilities mean that what you see is always current information, whether devices are online or offline.

Manage Complexity

Kaseya takes a comprehensive approach to address complexity. One system that manages everything means your team has to learn only one system, can streamline workflow, and receives consolidated tracking and reporting for compliance. For example, our solution delivers role-based, bird's eye view of infrastructure monitoring that empowers users to quickly and decisively drill down into tasks or potential problem areas and gain critical insights into the inner workings of their Kaseya deployment.

Automate Everything

VSA by Kaseya gets you access to meaningful and scalable automation in the blink of an eye. We have harvested the knowledge of experts across the globe to develop a solution that lets you turbocharge your business, as you need it when you need it. Regardless of the size of your organization, you can experience the rewards of higher operational productivity and improved service levels through IT automation. By implementing a comprehensive and integrated solution with the power, flexibility, and scalability to meet your needs today and expand as your firm grows, Kaseya's tools, technology, and resources enable a proactive approach to improved operations and end-user satisfaction.

Conclusion

By 2023, more than 40 billion3 loT devices are expected to be installed worldwide. As BYOD culture holds center stage, 87 percent4 of companies rely on their employees using personal devices to access business apps. These personal devices have high chances of being connected to your other loT devices. You might have the latest antivirus installed on your laptop, but what about other less-secure devices that are connected to them? This can be an alarming situation, as the security of your organization is only as strong as its weakest link.

This is just one of the many problems of working with multiple vendors and multiple software suites. With diverse needs and multiple options for apps prevailing in the market, it is expensive for the IT team to create customized integrated solutions. You can't put a price on the time and productivity lost.

Technology is changing the midmarket landscape as we know it. To better manage this changing landscape, enterprises need a transformative solution. To be successful, UEM is a critical business need, not a luxury. With the right solution in place, a new world of possibilities and competitiveness will be open to your business.