For many years until now, many organizations are operating in a multi-endpoint management platforms which make the overall control chain difficult and a very daunting task. This could stem from recent global pandemic to an economic downturn with increasing security risks, whereby people leverage remote work to perform their duties and security professionals were expectedly under more pressure than ever to deliver greater cyber security with little or no preparation.
The responsive approach to cushion the effect of unpreparedness to combat cyber threat resonating from working remotely with inadequate security posture has resulted in many organizations falling behind on both short-term and long-term security projects. With transformation projects losing funding and sailing on half-baked security measures with increasing in threat surface. It's now very obvious across the board that the fire-drill operations of the pandemic are not only here to stay but are accelerating and becoming more impactful where IT teams are burned out, security attacks are increasing and employees are expecting more from IT staff as remote and hybrid work have become the norm. The responsibility are higher than ever, and these trends will increase exponentially and will require a new approach to addressing these security challenges.
A drastic strategic deliver of a new security model is imminent that require security professional and Stakeholders to focus on being responsive to truly transforming digital landscape through consolidation and automation to facilitate secured and encrypted channel of authentications for people to work where and how they want to without jeopardizing their digital experience. A way to go to ensuring that IT and security teams focus on more strategic security process and reduce operational complexity is to adopt the principle of consolidation. This principle would harness all the broken links into one umbrella to form a one-stop tool for the management of all electronic devices, stemming from Endpoints, Network gears, IoTs, other IT devices and applications. Simplifying the endpoint management approach will will drastically increase the IT staff productivity, better employee experiences, a better security posture and ultimately better business continuity and objective realization.
The importance of consolidated, automated, and secure endpoint management
The simplification of endpoint management means removing the challenges of having too many endpoint management tools. A recent survey indicates that IT teams with consolidated endpoint management platform could save at least 10 percent of work time per year in the first year of use, and increases overtime. Also, two-thirds of respondents were using more than 10 tools to manage and protect their endpoints. Using more tools for endpoint management potentially means having more pane of glasses, more vendor contract renewals, more different training sessions. To address these security gaps would require integration and consolidation of these security tools into one tool to manage.
Benefit of Endpoint Tools Consolidation.
Consolidation delivers a single pane of glass, thus freeing up IT staff’s time from complexity of managing many unified endpoint management (UEM) solutions; from selecting the vendor to training and onboarding each incremental solution.
Facilitates greater automation as it yields better results when it pulls from a central pool of data that requires consolidation.
Automation improve security as data is automatically applied rather than manual processes to eliminate vulnerabilities caused by human error.
Six-step process for endpoint management consolidation
Vision and planning. This stage involves security pathways and analyzing the bigger picture for endpoint management destination in the nearest future. To accomplish this task would require the identification of key stakeholders to benefit from the simplification. Gain a deep understanding of existing tool sets, processes, and, most importantly, the problems they need to solve. In this stage, IT team should get comfortable with the idea of new change and how best the current security challenges would be solved with a modern approach and never fall into the trap of replicating previous cutting-edge tools.
Consolidate endpoint management tools to drive more efficiency for IT and security operations teams, delivering a more unified employee experience. To make space for new initiatives, it helps to stop doing things that unnecessarily add the team’s workload. This would necessitate freeing up IT team’s time by reducing the number of endpoint tools to oversee and manage.
Integrating endpoint management, security, and help desk tools for simplification. This enhances automation of key processes such as procurement, help desk experience, software and hardware asset management, and vulnerability management.
Streamlining spend analysis and asset management by integrating management endpoint analytics and service management tool. With this, endpoint management tool would be configured to automate patching and vulnerability remediation. Connecting these assets will drive further simplification with broader process automation.
Data provisioning. As data is a powerful asset that is often underutilized, simplifying and consolidating the endpoint would generate new data that can be used to understand your endpoint landscape end-to-end with visibility. With endpoint analytics, gain visibility into your device estate to understand how users are interacting with your digital services. Leverage this data to understand further best security practices and the of use generative AI to identifying scenarios to better understand your environment, including trends, best practices, and simplified troubleshooting.
Automating common endpoint and security tasks. Integrating rich data, advanced endpoint management capabilities, and dynamic orchestration would drastically transform IT services delivery and increase security through rich and extensible automation to generally increase security posture of the organization.
By Chinedu Okafor, Information Security Engineer, Certified Microsoft Azure Security Engineer.
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