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The Benefits of Managing Your End Points Through a SaaS-Based UEM

By RAJESH PHILLIPS posted Sun November 24, 2019 04:18 AM

  

Why should organizations look at deploying SaaS UEM?

The world is changing rapidly, and organizations are looking at digital transformation seriously to reduce operational cost and increase effectiveness of IT processes. One option is to identify applications/workloads that can be moved to the cloud. Let us look at some of the advantages in leveraging a SaaS-based UEM product.

 

Rapid changes needed – zero-day


In the world of ever-increasing security threats, vulnerabilities, OS updates and continuous streams of zero-day support challenges, organizations need to have the ability to deploy changes near zero-day and ensure nothing is broken. Automatic support updates and maintenance are integral for ensuring that organizations’ devices are protected and kept up to date. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

 

Heterogeneous device and app environments


Gone are the days when organizations had only desktops or laptops. Nowadays, a typical employee uses at least 2 devices a day for work, and in most cases, one of those devies is personally-owned. Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) is a major trend that continues to grow in the enterprise.

On top of this expanding device ecosystem, companies are also dealing with a significant number of cloud applications per operating system (OS). This makes it imperative for the devices to be patched regularly, ensuring the apps and OS itself are not vulnerable.

 

Support


Availability of 24/7/365 global support is invaluable. Take for example a typical UEM administrator. We’ll call him Scott.

Scott has to deal with 50+ other tickets beyond UEM, and his phone is set to do not disturb. At the same time, let’s assume the VPN is down, and Scott is not able to login to the network to make changes. Much of the time these changes can be handled within the UEM tool living outside of the network.

Low cost of ownership

Having a UEM based in someone else’s cloud eliminates the need for an on-prem administrator with domain knowledge, an inhouse help desk, operating system skills, DBAs, high availability, disaster recovery/COOP, network, power, space, cooling, UPS—and the list goes on. Additionally, the staffing and retention of this type of an on-prem team is another challenge.

Further, hardware vendors keep coming up with new updates and versions. Administrators of on-prem technology need to plan for downtime over the weekends and also work with procurement to buy new hardware. This can be quite time and labor-intensive.

Lastly, cost is a major benefit for a SaaS UEM as it is simply priced per license, with different licensing terms available based on number of devices sometimes starting as low as $4 per device/month.

(For those organizations seeking environmental sustainability, one other caveat is a SaaS solution helps to reduce carbon footprint.)

 

Leverage power of cloud


Imagine when your organization all of a sudden goes from 10,000 devices to 70,000 devices overnight with a merger or acquisition. Imagine this is happening on a multinational scale. How can you adapt quickly to handle the load of another 50,000 devices? Involving procurement to buy new hardware and build out support for these new requirements, while keeping in mind the additional guidelines of HA and disaster recovery for different countries can be nightmarish for an understaffed or otherwise stretched organization. In the case of SaaS UEM, however, this scenario can be easily managed as the infrastructure is already present and ready to support the influx of new devices and users.

 

Quick trials/POCs


There is nothing worse than deploying a new feature which cripples your entire organization. Most leading companies embrace dark launching of new features with limited trials and beta options available. Organizations can take advantage of validating/exploring new features and checking the relevancy/performance on a targeted pilot group of users/devices without having to do any additional installation/configurations.

 

On-prem connectivity


Capability to support hybrid deployments across public/private clouds is picking up fast. Bridge to allow HTTPS connection to an on-prem LDAP server with a limited firewall opening to a certain port/IP helps to mitigate security concerns.

However, if your organization deals with sensitive data and has strict compliance challenges, the choices available are limited but it comes with an additional cost factor and some of the challenges above.

IBM for SaaS UEM


IBM MaaS360 has been named as a leader in 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Endpoint Management Tools and is positioned furthest for Completeness of Vision in this year’s report.  Join thousands of global customers who use IBM MaaS360 to protect their enterprise data, enable user productivity and comply with security/privacy regulations.


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