As users and their devices become increasingly dispersed, remote endpoint management is an increasingly crucial part of organisational infrastructure. IT decision-makers have more responsibility than ever to ensure their organisation's toolset allows for remote patching, updating, troubleshooting, and administering of endpoints.
As users and their devices become increasingly dispersed, remote endpoint management is an increasingly crucial part of organisational infrastructure. IT decision-makers have more responsibility than ever to ensure their organisation's toolset allows for remote patching, updating, troubleshooting, and administering of endpoints.
Ed Alford, New Look CTO, explains how important this challenge is and its broader implications.
"A lot of the time, it's about giving the end users the same experience they'd get at home. For employees working in any organisation, the easier it is to use those endpoints, the more productive they are," says Alford. "If you have creaking infrastructure networks or have to click a whole bunch of things to tunnel into your work environment, it drains productivity and morale. The environment needs to be silent so that nobody notices it."
Users now expect seamless, secure, and simple interactions. They want to access information independent of device, network, and geographical location. Modern customers are far more likely to be engaged by convenient services because confusing experiences are negative experiences. Organisations that cannot facilitate this or keep pace will ultimately lose their competitive advantage.
"It's important to create the right environment," says Alford. "We want our customers to have good experiences whether they are in store or at home online. Creating an omnichannel experience whereby the app, website, mobile point of sales systems and store point of sale systems are refreshed and engaging while getting across why we do what we do - which is providing sustainable clothing - is so important."
Effective endpoint management that provides visibility of networks, applications, and data is also crucial for maintaining an efficient, secure estate. All organisations are aware that today's cyber incidents are pervasive and advanced, and the repercussions of a successful attack are detrimental to productivity, reputation, and finances.
Device monitoring that is proactive rather than reactive is a key initiative in protecting possible attack surfaces. This ‘shifting left' on support removes IT burden and sustains efficiency.
"We pick up on the health of devices so that if we see a problem we can get ahead of it," Alford says. "We help to educate people to understand that keeping devices healthy and running smoothly will mean we're ahead of support issues before users raise a ticket or they become major problems."
IT leaders need to plan for today and tomorrow, looking ahead and outwards by regularly reviewing solutions and priorities. Remote endpoint management on a reliable platform is now a must-have.
To hear from Ed Alford about New Look's endpoint management strategy, watch the full interview with Computing's Stuart Sumner by visiting the Intel vPro platform via the link below.
This post is sponsored by Intel
