It is a digital era, and businesses and enterprises worldwide are endeavoring to enter it by eliminating the manual and older digital technology to keep up with the latest technology trends. Digital transformation can make life better both for enterprises and their employees. It has changed the way we perceive and do work. Rather than being confined to the office, we have digital workspaces now. Every enterprise would need to focus on managing their new digital workspaces that can include a blend of different operating systems distributed in different places. A solution that comes to mind is a Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) solution. The management capabilities are evolving along with the device technology, and UEM is the latest update that enterprises can hop on.
Table of Contents
What is a digital workspace?
A digital workspace is more identity-centric rather than device-centric. It centralizes the management of all the enterprise’s applications, data, and devices, supporting the “work from anywhere” model.
The need for Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is the need of the hour, and it has only been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. There are many advantages for an enterprise in implementing digital workspaces:
- Security has always been a priority: Ensuring device compliance, user compliance, data compliance, and application compliance while securing the network is something every company has to do. It seems like a tedious and difficult task, and it can be if the organization is still hung up on older models of work.
- Worker efficiency from anywhere: Remote work proved to be a boon for business continuity even when the pandemic struck, enabling many enterprises to remain productive and running. Dealing with a dispersed workforce that does not depend on the physical office has been possible only with digital transformation.
- On-demand services: Most of the software services are now available as an As-a-Service model, allowing the businesses to use them on-demand rather than making a long-term commitment or purchasing the software for good.
- Faster and better decision making: Data and analytics form the core component of future decision-making. Digital transformation allows companies to have a large amount of data, and they can take advantage of it to make better and faster decisions.
Main areas of digital transformation
Digital transformation does not occur in one or two days. It is a process that requires diligent and smart planning by a competent team. We have seen digital transformation in our lives, even if we may have not been explicitly aware of it. Remember when the records room at any company would be a huge room or a set of rooms with stacks and stacks of files? Now, higher volumes of data can be stored in a memory card, let alone the high-end storage disks. Changing physical processes into digital workflows, physical meetings to video conferencing, using messaging and collaboration tools are all part of the digital transformation. For the enterprise to change as a whole, the change has to be more streamlined and planned.
Different facets of digital transformation
Cloud Services
Cloud services are an integral element of modern IT, and digital transformation is no exception. Cloud gives the opportunity for the organizations to capitalize on higher computational capabilities at a lower cost, flexibility to scale up or down according to the business needs, and avail resources that support the use of technologies like Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence does not have to be as fancy as Sophia, the humanoid robot. It can be as simple as analyzing the customer data and insights to optimize their experience. AI is one of the main drivers of digital transformation and it enables the business to become more flexible, adaptive, and sensitive to the customer experience.
Edge Computing
According to Gartner, “edge computing is a part of a distributed computing topology in which information processing is located close to the edge – where things and people produce or consume that information.” Simply put, edge computing brings the computing and storage closer to the physical location of the users or the devices, rather than depending on a central location that could be located thousands of miles away. Edge computing is popular because of its higher speed and the opportunity it provides for enterprise digital transformation.
Why is digital transformation important for enterprises?
Remember Eastman Kodak company? The phrase “Kodak moment” must have come to mind. A pioneer of photography in the analog age, the company failed to keep up with the digital camera age and had to file for bankruptcy in 2012. Ironically, the company’s research team had come up with a digital camera as early as the 1970s. However, the company failed to keep up with the technology and had to lose its edge in the market where it had previously dominated in.
Digital transformation is important for businesses to keep moving forward. It enables the businesses to use innovative technologies to push the business into reaching new heights.
A holistic approach to digital transformation with UEM
A digital workspace is fundamentally different from a traditional workspace. The devices are no longer installed in the offices, and it is no longer confined to desktops and laptops. The term “going to the office” is now mostly obsolete from our daily lives, as we have our offices at our fingertips. What does this transformation mean to the IT admins? It certainly would have been a nightmare to an admin who depends on traditional methods of device management that could only have managed the devices on the internal network. Now, more and more enterprises are using UEM solutions for their endpoint management needs to overcome these challenges. According to a Gartner report, “By 2024, more than half of the organizations will consolidate to a unified console for endpoint management and security tasks, up from less than 5% in 2020”. This is a significant increase, and it does not even seem a stretch as all of us are racing towards digital transformation.
UEM features that can’t be missed
Multi-platform support
One of the handiest features of a UEM is its capability to manage devices running on different operating systems from a single console. For instance, Hexnode UEM manages, monitors, and secures the endpoints running Windows, macOS, Android, FireOS, iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS operating systems.
BYOD management
Enterprise digital transformation has seen a huge spike in the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) culture. Using personal devices for work can raise numerous security concerns, but it is possible to address them with a UEM solution. UEM helps to create clear segregation between work and personal data and secures the work container.
Automation
Common device management functions like device on-boarding and off-boarding, enrolling devices, application deployment, and many more can be automated using a UEM solution. Additionally, Hexnode UEM also supports Windows and Mac scripting so that the IT admin can automate all the tedious repetitive tasks in the managed devices.
Enterprise integrations
Any technology is at its strongest when it builds upon the existing ones. With suitable integrations, the IT admin can implement a seamless management strategy for the endpoints. Hexnode UEM supports a wide range of enterprise integrations such as:
- Apple Business/School Manager
- Microsoft Active Directory
- Microsoft Azure Active Directory
- SCCM
- Android Enterprise
- Okta
- Gsuite
- Zendesk
- OEM vendor partnerships like Samsung Knox, LG Gate, Kyocera, Zebra, Sony, Datalogic, and more.
Scalability
We can never predict how the business may grow, and when the business grows, so does its devices. It is important that as your company is growing digitally, the management capabilities should grow along with it. A UEM solution allows you to add or remove users and devices with a single click. It is precisely that ease of use that is a direct consequence of digital transformation.
Security features like VPN and encryption
As we mentioned before, companies used to keep their data and records in the records room. Security in those days was as simple as keeping the room under lock and key. Breaking into it was also as simple as breaking the lock. Now, with everything being stored digitally, the security needs are a bit more complex. A UEM comes with many security features built into it. The admin can enable full-disk encryption for the managed devices (for example FileVault in Macs), configure a VPN tunnel remotely, push the enterprise Wi-Fi to the enrolled devices, blacklist/whitelist websites or applications, and more.
Context-driven management with dynamic grouping
Minimizing the manual efforts for tedious tasks is one of the goals of enterprise digital transformation so that the employees are free to use up their time for more productive endeavors. Dynamic grouping in Hexnode UEM allows the admin to group the managed devices based on certain conditions. The devices are grouped automatically according to the specified conditions and the admin can then apply the needed policies and configurations to this group without manually adding the devices one by one.
Compliance checks
Every enterprise has its own compliance rules, and the UEM should be able to check the device, user, data, and app compliance according to the custom compliance rules. Hexnode UEM allows compliance tracking and informs the admin when the devices go out of compliance.
Remote management for digital workspaces
We have remote workers working on managed devices in a remote environment. To manage these remote devices, the UEM should be capable of monitoring and managing the devices remotely. With Hexnode UEM, the admin can remotely view, control and configure location tracking while managing all the configurations from the web console.
It does not stop here. From out-of-the-box enrollment to numerous policy configurations to excellent reports and analysis, UEM plays a vital role in enterprise digital transformation. Technology is changing the enterprise landscape, and UEM is essential for enterprises to pave the path for enterprise digital transformation.
Let Hexnode UEM take over and accelerate your enterprise digital transformation journey.Digital Transformation with Hexnode UEM
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