Simplifying your endpoint management is a process, not a single event. I would identify five separate steps:
The five-step process to simplify endpoint management
- Refine the vision and create a plan. In this stage, work with a small team to paint a picture of the future and build buy-in to the journey. To do this, identify the key stakeholders that will benefit from the simplification, and what they need. Gain a deep understanding of their existing tool sets, processes, and, most importantly, the problems they need to solve. Bring outside experts in to talk about the journeys they have taken or plan to take. And get your team comfortable with the idea of change: Some IT admins and specialists may have invested time and effort in learning previously cutting-edge tools that you are planning to upgrade. Be cautious not to fall into the trap of replicating previous solutions with traditional approaches; instead, focus on the problem and how to best solve with a modern approach. Help the broader team get excited about the new direction, and see the benefit of evangelizing change, not blocking it.
- Consolidate endpoint management tools to drive more efficiency for IT and security operations teams, delivering a more unified employee experience. To make space for new initiatives, it helps to stop doing things that unnecessarily add to your team’s workload. So, freeing up your team’s time by reducing the number of endpoint tools they have to oversee and manage will help you move towards more strategic automation. Execute against an incremental plan that shows progress along the way and puts points on the board as you go. Pick an on-ramp to get started—Windows 11 is a great opportunity to move to cloud-native Windows management; Microsoft 365 has powerful new security protections to mitigate against modern threats; and Mac and Linux devices are now ready to be brought under management with a modern cloud-native approach. These are all great on-ramps that will help progress your endpoint management consolidation journey. Most importantly, show progress and build confidence as you go.
- Create tight integration between your management, security, and help desk tools to drive further simplification. Simplification does not end with consolidation of your endpoint management tooling. Automate key processes such as procurement, help desk experience, software and hardware asset management, and vulnerability management by tightly integrating your management tool with your help desk and security tooling. By connecting your management tooling data directly to your help desk tool, you can simplify further with a management-powered remote help experience. Streamline your spend analysis and asset management by integrating management endpoint analytics and your service management tool. Bring your IT and security teams together by integrating Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to automate patching and vulnerability remediation. Connecting these assets will drive further simplification with broader process automation.
- Make use of your data. Data is a powerful asset that is often underutilized. By simplifying and consolidating your endpoint approach you will have access to new data that can be used to understand your endpoint landscape end-to-end. Your journey to data consolidation will likely be incremental as well. Start with visibility. With endpoint analytics, gain visibility into your device estate to understand how users are interacting with your digital services. Leverage this data to understand further best practices and your areas of opportunity. Use this data to help define your incremental consolidation plan. With this data foundation in place, you can begin to explore how to best use generative AI. Begin identifying scenarios where AI can help you better understand your environment, including trends, best practices, and simplified troubleshooting.
- Intelligently automate your common endpoint and security tasks. By bringing together rich data, advanced endpoint management capabilities, and dynamic orchestration, you can now radically transform your approach to delivering IT services and increasing security through rich and extensible automation. With turnkey in-product functionality, you can move away from complex scripting workloads and instead focus on creation of simplified workflows to handle cumbersome administrative tasks. Intelligent orchestration can elevate the employee lifecycle experience, optimize license or hardware spend, and increase your security posture in a world that is rapidly changing—with intelligent automation you can embrace the complexity of modern IT challenges and unlock the simplicity within.
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