The Economics of Unified Endpoint Management (UEM)

Is your Chief Financial Officer (CFO) asking you to cut costs? Inflation in the United States is now at 8.5 percent, meaning higher input costs for businesses. Furthermore, the cost of recruiting and retaining IT staff has increased. It’s also important to recognize that business cases may have changed in the past couple of years because of changes in staff costs or the cost of cyber breaches. The endpoint is the new workplace. Providing resolutions to users—delivered by the right helper, with the right permissions, at the right time—is crucial for organizations in today’s hybrid world.

Why invest in UEM tools?

An independent Forrester analysis described three of the main benefits of unified endpoint management:

1. The savings from reduced support tickets due to more automated endpoint security.

   Unified endpoint management reduces support needs. Fewer support tickets result in fewer hours spent by helpdesk staff. The automation of workflows from unified endpoint management saves IT time, which can then be redeployed to more strategic projects.

2. The savings from centralizing endpoint management by attaching on-premises devices to the cloud.

   The ability to centralize endpoint management reduces fragmented costs. Allowing IT admins to manage devices from anywhere provides for greater staffing flexibility and economies of scale as IT admins can manage endpoints from one console, rather than separate panes of glass. It also ensures devices are configured and up to date with the latest security patches, whether the device is on a local network or not.

3. Reducing the risk of a security breach and the associated costs from data loss.

   Unified endpoint management helps reduce the risk of data breaches. Accepting that data breaches are frequently happening, and organizations of every size are vulnerable is the first step towards protection. Reducing the risk of a data breach by 30 to 50 percent results in significant enterprise savings. On top of the lost employee productivity costs, there are direct out-of-pocket costs of a data breach, such as the extra work in remediating the breach and possible increases in insurance premiums.

Emerging trends for 2022

Forrester sees a few major trends emerging for UEM this year. In a market where every company would offer remote endpoint management and a good one at that, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are realizing the only way to move ahead is to stand out. They need a solution that facilitates efficiency, ease of user experience, and productivity rather than one that merely monitors devices. So, what’s in store for UEM? Big things! Analysts suggest:

• The use of end-user experience monitoring (EUEM) will become more common among organizations.
• There will be an acceleration of modern management - a strategy to manage endpoints in a unified way without compromising the security of the endpoints.
• Vendors will offer combined management and security capabilities within a single platform working toward the continued convergence of endpoint management and endpoint security.
• Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and automation will play increasingly important roles in UEM platforms.
  

In a post-COVID business environment, most business leaders expect to have many
employees working remotely, sometimes on their own devices, and many others working
On-site. Let us help you move your IT operations to an agile, cloud based state that not only improves the end-user and endpoint management experience, but strategically positions your Information and Operation Technology as bottom-line drivers. Contact us today to learn more.