The advancement of digital technology and the arrival of a more knowledge-centric global economy has given rise to the digital nomads, or a class of people who prefer to work remotely and earn a livelihood. The advent of the pandemic in 2020 has literally forced organizations to shift to a remote work mode almost overnight. In fact, a Gartner survey revealed that 88% of the organizations, worldwide, made it mandatory or encouraged their employees to work from home after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. What is common in both these scenarios is the increasing dependency on endpoints (laptops, desktops, mobile devices, and even virtual environments) that function optimally and do not cause incidents that will dampen the end-user’s productivity. With this growing remote work culture, endpoint incident detection and resolution are becoming a high priority.
It is natural to start questioning if the traditional methods of endpoint management and security are going to scale in real-time and deliver on the expectations set by the modern world. To add to the woes of enterprises, skilled IT staff and service desk personnel are in short supply. Without visibility and control over endpoints in modern digital environments, enterprises are like a sitting duck, fully exposed to external threats and unwarranted business downtime. That is precisely why Autonomous Endpoints are the future.
Let us define Autonomous Endpoints
You are likely to stumble upon numerous ways how Autonomous Endpoints are defined. To put it simply, Autonomous Endpoints are devices (laptops, desktops, mobile devices and even VMs) that leverage automation and machine learning algorithms to self-heal incidents and proactively optimize the endpoint performance. They have pre-built mechanisms to detect, triage and offer to take remediation actions in a variety of difficult situations. Being proactive by design, Autonomous Endpoints discover potential threats and conditions that could lead to downtime or decreased performance. This enables remote workers to perform with minimum disruptions in their workspace experience. By now, you might be wondering how they do and what goes into making a truly Autonomous Endpoints. Let us deep dive into that aspect now.
How Autonomous Endpoints work in real-time?
Almost always, an Autonomous Endpoint will have a light agent (a small software with or without a user interface) sitting on the end-user’s device. This agent is tasked with capturing telemetry data about systems, applications and networks, mapping all interdependencies. This data enables proactive detection and triaging of endpoint issues and helps perform a root-cause analysis.
These agents are also equipped to perform several periodic health and compliance checks to ensure policy and patch updates on the endpoint. Collection of User Experience (UX), endpoint health scores and qualitative feedback from end-users helps gain visibility into the end-user’s experience.
Very often, Autonomous Endpoint solutions provide visualizations in the form of dashboards to analyze device and issue-level trends, their impact and proactive recommendations to optimize IT assets.
At every stage of endpoint management, Autonomous Endpoints outdo the traditional endpoint management approach and deliver better business value. The most immediate and urgent need is for better IT helpdesk efficiency. The lack of detailed Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for IT issues, the unavailability of helpdesk resources due to massive volume of trouble tickets, and zero visibility into the endpoint environment leads to frustration and inefficiencies. Self-heal actions pre-empt the need for trouble tickets and reduces the burden of catering to repetitive issues.
Imagine a world with zero calls being made to the help desk and the trouble ticket queue looks empty. Imagine the IT procurement team celebrating millions of dollars of savings from unnecessary hardware and software license upgrades. The employee almost never complaints of a blue screen of death or a slow network during a customer presentation. Autonomous Endpoints improve compliance, control, visibility, and reporting which is a must-have in the new remote working model of business.
We need to move towards a world where employees and customers will not need to respond to endpoint incidents. And that’s primarily why Autonomous Endpoints are relevant today. Autonomous Endpoints and associated configurations are evolving each day. The greater number of Autonomous Endpoints, the more efficient IT infrastructure and operations for your business. If you are looking for a competitive advantage and have plans to undertake massive digital transformation initiatives, you cannot afford to miss out onboarding Autonomous Endpoints – The Real Game Changers.
