Why can’t we be friends? PC + Mobile: Unified Endpoint Management

When you’re dealing with power supplies, parallel operation can be a good thing. But when it comes to endpoint management strategies, parallel may seem more like dealing with alternate realities.

For many companies, mobile access management is too often on a separate track from that of PCs, laptops and servers. But market pressures and trends are having a profound impact on the enterprise today and are forcing those tracks together.

These pressures are focused around two primary sets of users, or personas. The first is an aggregate of IT Operations Staff and the CxOs, struggling to adapt the enterprise to mobility. On the ops side, they’re being asked to integrate mobility with the enterprise’s systems of record, while CxOs are dealing with the transformational aspects of mobility and its impact on their business both internally and externally.

The second persona represents the end users, who in this day and age may include not only employees, but also contractors and business partners. All of them want to be able to access the enterprise whenever they need to, from wherever they are and from whichever of their devices is most convenient. Moreover, they don’t want to deal with IT, but prefer the self-service approach to enrolling their devices and gaining access to the corporate apps, data and network in a secure fashion.

When an end user is accessing corporate data from a smartphone or tablet one day, and a laptop or desktop the next, the inefficiencies of maintaining separate management tracks for these parallel environments becomes readily apparent.

Not surprisingly, that is leading to demands for management solutions that cover the diversity of endpoints from smartphones to servers. That approach is commonly referred to as unified endpoint management (UEM).

For the end user—who is now solidly of the “bring your own environment” mindset—this unified approach ensures that their personal and corporate data, apps, access, and content are segregated, letting the enterprise manage what belongs to the enterprise and keeping its hands off the personal stuff.

For IT Operations, UEM lets them account for the security and compliance of devices, allows them to track inventory and remotely manage devices where and when necessary and tie the software and usage data into their overall license management system. Just as important, they’re able to control the lifecycle of the devices, application and content on these devices to ensure they stay current with enterprise policy and processes.

Most vendors come at this situation with a product that is either strong on mobility or strong on traditional endpoint management, with lesser capabilities added to account for the other half of the problem.

IBM’s approach is to bring together the capabilities of two top-rated solutions, IBM’s MaaS360 and IBM Endpoint Manager, both of which were recently rated as leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Client Management Tools and Enterprise Mobility Management respectively for the third year in a row.

IBM Unified Endpoint Management provides real-time visibility and control across the diversity of endpoints – from mobile devices to servers – both on and off your corporate network, so you can find and fix problems in minutes. This is all done through a single management console that delivers a unified view of all endpoints (smartphones, laptops, desktops, servers) in real-time and enables key policy settings and actions to improve your security posture.

Are you still managing your endpoints in parallel tracks?

Watch the upcoming live demo to learn how PC’s and smartphones are becoming good friends with Unified Endpoint Management.

Register here.