The IT world has been ruled by acronyms since its infancy. It all started with the very first set of bits (b), and then evolved into the byte (B), which then grew to kilobytes (KB). Ever since, dozens of new acronyms have come along. It’s just our nature as IT specialists. Today let’s talk about a relatively new one. Unified Endpoint Management (UEM). Because it’s growing more important now and in the future.
M stands for Management
We’ll start at the back for convenience sake. M stands for management and is at the heart of what we – IT people – do. Manage. We manage software, hardware, networks, user accounts, clouds. It is no exaggeration to say that 90% of IT work consists of management. And now with UEM, we have another management option.
E stands for Endpoint
M is still pretty general, until we see more possibilities by adding the element of E. It stands for Endpoint, and it’s a hip indication of everything that a user… well, uses. A decade ago, that was mostly the desktop, but since Steve Jobs triumphantly showcased the first iPad in 2010, it showed just how diverse the world of the endpoint could be from desktops, notebooks, and printers to tablets and smartphones. Even IoT equipment falls under the Endpoint category. And don’t forget the smartwatch, by the way. As you can see, there are an incredible variety of endpoints. And who knows what will come next in the near future? It is only logical that endpoint management will be a major challenge, and will need even more solutions.
U stands for Unified
The crux of this story is in the first letter U, which stands for Unified. There are already good solutions to manage mobile devices in an organization. MDM will probably look familiar to you, which means mobile device management. It allows you to provide mobile devices with settings, software, user rights, etc. And you can remotely track and possibly disable them. There is also something like EMM, enterprise mobility management, which does much the same thing, but has much more extensive capabilities. In addition there are other things for users who use their own smartphone or tablet for work, BYOD. This stands for Bring Your Own Device. Unified Endpoint Management ensures that all equipment can be managed in one overview. These include desktops and notebooks – the ‘regular’ computer – and more exotic things like printers, watches and other internet-connected devices.
With UEM you can manage hardware as well as software and even documents, and even the associated rights. This can provide a solution for the privacy legislation. An interesting option is that you can regulate users to choose and replace strong passwords. As a software deployment maker: you can add applications to a black or white list. This way you can push software into equipment and prohibit certain applications from coming on to the corporate network, even if they are on the users’ own devices.
You’ll hear more from us
In the coming years, you will hear the term Unified Endpoint Management more and more often. We also use it at Easy Software Deployment, with good reason. An average user in an organization already has three devices. This is expected to increase to four and even five per person in the near future.
Currently, Easy Software Deployment Unified Endpoint Management in the form of managing all applications, software and updates and endpoints based on Windows is already possible. But at the end of the day, you want to join all devices in one system, especially if you have to roll out software to different devices. We’re working on that. Check our public roadmap to stay up to date with new developments.
Curious what Easy Software Deployment has to offer? Request a free and short online demo here.