How do I select a unified endpoint management solution for my business?

Having an appropriate unified endpoint management (UEM) solution is important nowadays, not only because of the growing number of devices every organization has in its network, but also because of a surge in cybersecurity threats that are making them increasingly vulnerable.

To select a suitable UEM solution for your business, you need to think about a variety of factors. We’ve talked to several industry professionals to get their insight on the topic.

Kristin Hazlewood, VP and GM, HCL

As cyber threats continue to increase globally, it has never been more vital to critically assess prospective UEM vendors in these areas:

Capabilities: Along with providing the basic patching functions, can they also provide strategic insights to continually drive IT operations forward? Automation and a broad set of content is required.

Coverage: Modern enterprises have many different operating systems to manage, such as servers on prem or in the cloud (many of which have older versions to support), laptops, and mobile devices.

Expertise: Do they have a strong bench of IT operations experts? You want a company that has years of experience supporting customers in meeting their goals, and has experts in place across multiple areas of IT.

Range of services: Threat actors are constantly evolving and you want to make sure the vendor can deliver a range of services to keep pace – including new, innovative solutions to keep your data safe as the landscape changes. This includes solutions for all aspects of visibility, remediation, compliance and more.

Track record: Do they have a proven track record with companies that look like yours in terms of size, market vertical, etc.? They should also have case studies and references who can verify they’re a good fit for your company.

Dana Ragsdill, Director of Product Management, Quest

An ideal UEM solution can discover and identify all devices that are accessing your network and data, not only those devices that are imported into the management system.

It’s critical that a UEM solution should be able to manage not just Windows 10 computers, but also all your endpoints including servers, iOS, Android, Linux, Chromebook, non-computers like printers and IoT devices. If it doesn’t, you’ll have to research and buy multiple systems, train, maintain and try to share data between them.

Flexibility is key, especially with the current shift to a hybrid workforce. You will need to manage both modern/mobile devices with auto-enrollment and easy wipe/lock features, and the granular OS and application patching, vulnerability scanning, scripting and asset management of traditional management.

With the accelerated move to the cloud, you should have a choice to go either/or cloud or on premises, subscription and/or perpetual licensing, as well as agent and/or agentless management. This ensures you don’t back yourself into a corner.

In terms of telemetry, make sure that the solution, when pushing something out to a remote device, can show the progress and status and easily troubleshoot. For visibility, select a solution with pre-built dashboards out of the box and one that provides the ability to easily create reports that can be scheduled and automatically sent to those who need them.

Josh Schofield, Sr. Director of Product Management, Tanium

Choosing a UEM solution for your organization is critical to the success of its technology program. And as hybrid and work-from-home paradigms have ramped up environmental complexity, while lean technology teams cope with increased demand, there’s an urgent need to find solutions that can do more, with less. That means more supported device types and operating systems with fewer consoles, fewer agents, and a reduction in required management infrastructure.

Your UEM solution must do the following:

• Find every connected device in your organization’s environment.
• Manage all devices which access corporate resources.
• Remediate issues, small or large, that impact users or the business. Being aware of problems is not enough. You must be able to remediate and do so expeditiously.
• Provide scale and flexibility. Whatever challenges your UEM solution solves for, it must be able to do so for all endpoints, whether it be 1,000 or 1 million. The solution must address everything, and quickly.
• Meet business requirements. It is critical not to overlook the holistic needs of the business when assessing UEM solutions; security, risk, IT operations, procurement, and other departments all have use cases that your technology teams regularly support.