A global workforce at home as much as at the office for the foreseeable future. A growing menagerie of device types. Increasingly data-intensive applications. Fast-tracked digital transformations. These are hallmarks of an era that McKinsey & Company says will bring more technological change in the next 10 years than in the previous 100.
All these developments keep company IT teams on their toes. Prime among them (and making the top three on McKinsey’s list of change-drivers) is distributed IT infrastructure. This development, in particular, abounds with opportunity but can make managing a modern PC challenging as organisations gear up to support devices at the edge to realise the benefits.
At the heart of the challenge is a risk that many organisations still face: that business continuity will suffer if IT departments can’t get full visibility and manage all the devices accessing corporate IT networks. Solving the challenge requires wrangling proliferating equipment types, operating systems, and special-purpose devices along with the uncertainty of an era of rapid transformation — all while preserving security.
Proactive, hardware-based management solutions that help boost device performance can provide much-needed help for beleaguered IT professionals on the front lines of technological change.
“It’s amazing how, with the right tools in place, you can rescue that lost productivity”, says Matt Harrison, Technical Solutions Specialist at Intel, of work time lost to devices out of commission because of management tools that fall short.
Integrated management and security
The key to device manageability in today’s IT environment is trust. That’s why leading management tools work as an integrated part of a hardware-based platform.
For example, Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT), part of the Intel vPro® platform, provides a secured and scalable solution for enhanced manageability. That’s because Intel AMT operates below the operating system level to let IT pros effectively manage devices, ensuring they get the latest security updates and, if the worst case happens, remediate issues remotely. To enable organisations to realise the value of AMT inside vPro Platforms, Intel provides free, supported, and scalable cloud-based tools.
The Intel vPro platform integrates a range of technologies built for business IT. It gives IT departments confidence in the devices they manage by ensuring top performance and minimising the engineering work needed to maintain a stable fleet. With hardware-based security, they also know they are providing the most secure devices available.
It’s all available to IT departments out of the box, reducing IT burden and helping to keep workers productive.
Enabling modern remote manageability
Of course, managing devices for today’s hybrid workforce means providing support anywhere, any time. Intel AMT on the Intel vPro platform lightens the load on IT departments by helping them securely manage their fleets no matter where the devices are located. It also complements existing management tools by extending use cases and integrating with existing infrastructure and processes. For example, Intel® Endpoint Management Assistant (Intel® EMA) — a free, downloadable tool IT pros can use to securely configure and manage Intel AMT in their devices — integrates through APIs with external tools.
Altogether, Intel AMT increases IT efficiency, helping reduce costs while minimising user distractions, support calls, and work interruptions. And it lets companies ride the tsunami of change rather than get swamped by it.
Learn more about how hardware-based management can help IT departments security manage corporate devices anywhere at intel.co.uk/vpro.