According to Statista, there are 182 million laptops in use worldwide and expected to reach 202 million by 2028. With the growing need of laptops and other endpoints (Desktops and VDIs), irrespective of whether it is for personal use or professional use, the day-to-day challenge in Endpoints increases considerably.
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From an organization’s point of view, IT team must ensure the smooth day-to-day operations of Endpoints. Given below are a few challenges on various categories.
Hardware
- Laptop Heating issue
- Laptop battery not yielding backup
- Laptop battery not charging
- Device Driver conflict/Disabled
- USB malfunction
- Firmware issue
- Disk failure
- Random Reboot issue & improper shutdown
- Hardware changes (Removal of RAM)
- Date & time not in sync
- Application & OS Patches are not up-to-date
- Usage of unauthorized software against organization policy
- Endpoints missing mandatory software
In a normal situation, most of these problems are not known at early stage and cause serious showstopper. Only after the situation is bad, the IT department receive complaints from the users and then the IT support team looks for solutions and fixes the problems.
So, what is the impact of fixing the problem at its own pace? Well, this is reactive and due to the turn-around time, this impacts the productivity of the user and ultimately impacts the organization in terms of achieving its goal.
Proactive Situation Wouldn’t it be great if there is a single solution that can identify proactively, suggest, and fix the above scenarios?
ZIF Endpoint Management, a Digital Experience (DX+) is a proactive solution. To achieve this, DX+ monitors the resources at Endpoint, compliance and change of state at Endpoints. If there are gaps and issues, ZIF DX+ automatically applies the necessary self-healing, some of them are listed below. In addition to that, ZIF DX+ provides the remote console, where the IT admin can remotely debug the Endpoints without disturbing the user.
Resource Monitoring
- Resource Utilization – Helps to understand the resource (CPU, Memory, Disk, Network IO) utilization
- Resource Optimization – Helps know the available resource capacity (CPU, Memory, Disk) across single or group of machines
- Hardware Monitoring – CMOS Battery Monitoring, Fan speed, Temperature, Firmware
Compliance
- Compliance – Understand the unwanted application or process running at endpoints
- Software, License & Patch updates – Get notified about the software which is not required to be installed or outdated as per org standard
- Application Inventory – Understand the inventory of software installed on each endpoint
- Authenticity – Ensure the right member is using the endpoint device
Change Of State
- Change in behavior
- Change in Communication
- Change in target
- Change in Pattern of data
- Unauthorized usage of application
Self-healing
- Monitor the availability of mandatory software, if not, install
- Apply the GP and Patches, KBs
- Monitor the non-standard software, if any, uninstall
- Killing unwanted process/application
- Disk Defragmentation & Disk Cleaning
In summary, DX+ acts proactively to know the symptoms and take necessary action. For e.g., a patch that is missing in an Endpoint can cause massive impact if not taken care of at right time, with DX+ in place, it automatically identifies the gap and applies the recommended patch. Similarly, wherever there are brewing issues, they are identified and addressed. Available as SaaS https://zifdx.zif.ai/ and on-premises version, user can register, download and install the DX+ and get these benefits. DX+ plays a crucial role in Endpoint Security Management, we will see those in upcoming article.
Sources:
https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/consumer-electronics/computing/laptops/worldwide#volume
Author
Suresh Kumar Ramasamy
Suresh has 20 years of experience in Native Applications, Web, Cloud and Hybrid platforms from Engineering to Product & Program Management. He has designed & hosted the monitoring solutions. He has been instrumental in amalgamating components to structure the Environment Performance Management suite of ZIF Monitor. He heads the ZIF Monitoring & ZIF Discovery Platform.
Suresh enjoys playing badminton with his children. He is passionate about gardening, especially medicinal plants.
