Partner Insight: Why device management must change in the new world of work

Whilst for most organisations the coronavirus lockdown was the ultimate proof of concept for mobile, flexible working, it has been a significant challenge for those IT leaders who have to manage the supporting technology.

That's especially true for organisations that never pursued the development of an enterprise-wide culture of remote working and collaboration - until they had no choice.

Three months of lockdown proved that, out of necessity, the perimeter of any organisation is no longer the office or the corporate firewall; it now extends to wherever the furthest-away employee, partner, supplier, and/or connected device is in the world.

A new world for IT teams

However, the journey to this realisation has not been easy for some organisations. For any IT teams schooled in a world of on-premises maintenance and support (with a side order of DevOps), circumstance has forced the adoption of a different approach to device management than simply staffing the help desk at head office.

But in the cloud, necessity need not be the mother of invention; at least, not when standards-based endpoint IT management platforms are now available.

Arguably, this operational shift in workflow management should now been seen as something to lock down as a strategic change for the future, supported by these cloud-based technologies. This is because some work patterns and economic models are likely to have been permanently transformed.

Maintaining the new normal
With economic uncertainty growing, most organisations will strive to keep their property, energy, and admin costs down, while many employees are likely to want to keep working from home at least some of the time, to support their own commitments, lifestyles, and finances.

Not everyone who has successfully worked from home for an entire economic quarter is likely to want to return to hours of commuting five days a week, even if they miss many aspects of office life.

Public health challenges also remain, of course, which may force many people to stay away from crowded cities and towns.

As explored in our previous article, the shift to a new model of shared, remotely managed projects demands three things of the IT team: strong leadership; a flatter and more collaborative working culture; and a robust, secure, standards-driven infrastructure based in the cloud.

This is because whatever device an employee is using in their more remote and flexible working life, it will still need to host, store, process, or access internal applications, data, and services.

Moreover, every log-in and request will need to be authenticated. It's no longer sufficient to authorise a device, if the IT team can't be certain it has not been lost, stolen, or compromised while workers are away from head office.

Management challenges stack up

So - beyond security - what are the key management challenges, and how can they be overcome? Computing Research spoke to 150 IT leaders in medium to large organisations across most major sectors of the economy to see how they are managing their IT estates in this new world.

Fifty-five percent of respondents say they are already using PC management tools, including cloud-based suites. A further 25 percent are currently implementing them - perhaps spurred by the coronavirus - while another 14 percent are planning to do so within the next two years.

In total, an overwhelming majority of 94 percent are now on this journey.

One spur for adopting such systems is the need to support the new culture of remote working, suggests the research. Others include the growing demands for cybersecurity compliance, the increasing workload of the IT team itself, and the need for more efficient device management.

Device diversity

The proliferation of different employee devices has certainly made the user environment more diverse and complex for IT teams. This is why cloud-based tools offer a layer of support, management, and authentication that creates a new perimeter for the organisation - one that the team can both see and manage, regardless of their own location.

Sixty-seven percent of respondents to the Computing survey said they believed that multi-factor authentication will be a key device management function over the next three years. Meanwhile, cloud-based administration was cited by over half of IT leaders as a major plus.

With over three-quarters of the survey base saying they believe remote working causes increased device management challenges, the need for cloud-based tools should be clear.

Indeed, the majority said that advanced remote IT estate management tools are now a ‘must have': 32 percent strongly agreed with that view, while 41 percent agreed somewhat - a combined total of nearly three-quarters of IT managers.

Welcome to the new world. Many aspects of it may seem complicated and full of risk, but it can still be managed safely in the cloud.