Bringing it All Together: IDC Explains How Converged Endpoint Management Can Drive Success

Endpoint management and security teams have not always seen eye to eye. Despite a common goal of reducing enterprise risk, their siloed approach has been perpetuated over time by point solutions. However, a new IDC report shows that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

By consolidating onto a converged endpoint management (XEM) platform, both teams can finally come together and work from a single source of truth — to reduce risk and licensing costs, increase productivity and enhance end-user experiences.

Two separate worlds

IT endpoint management and endpoint security have traditionally been separate disciplines. The former deals with device deployment, OS and application updates, and software/hardware lifecycle management. And on the other side, there’s endpoint security deployment, policy enforcement, threat monitoring and incident response. According to IDC, most (75%) organizations continue to run these as separate functions, and over half use multiple tools on both sides to support their work.

Unfortunately, as the report explains, this has created multiple challenges, including:

• Complexity: Endpoint management and security teams are getting better at integration. But many still run similar but different tools to identify new threats and patch vulnerabilities. That can mean many actions are uncoordinated, redundant and/or counterproductive.
• Costs: From complexity comes higher costs due to inefficiencies in the way teams work.
• Collaboration: Siloed solutions make it difficult to truly collaborate. But forcing the issue can be counterproductive. Organizations need a place or platform where collaboration can grow organically.
• Employee experiences: Poor employee experience can negatively impact productivity and even job satisfaction.

How XEM can help

Fortunately, IDC highlights several ways XEM platforms can overcome these challenges and drive lasting benefits, including:

Reducing risk and complexity: This could include simplifying compliance reporting (which often straddles both management and security tasks) and reducing the scope of audits. XEM also reduces risk by providing rapid visibility into the security status of endpoints and the control to remediate immediately. That supports speedy threat detection/response and good cyber hygiene, as well as reducing app sprawl.

Cost reduction: XEM reduces tool sprawl by helping organizations consolidate on a single vendor platform and, in some cases, can replace entire products through the platform’s wide breadth of IT security and operations solutions. A high degree of automation also supports cost reduction in areas such as asset management.

Driving collaboration: Unifying IT and security teams around a single XEM platform like Tanium’s will help them to “discover new avenues of collaboration and take ownership of the results,” IDC says. In one example, a healthcare organization was able to absorb a headcount reduction of 30% because its once-siloed teams were working in closer harmony.

Improving the employee experience: Converged platforms can spot the early warning signs of performance issues that may impact the employee experience and lead to a flood of helpdesk tickets. They can also streamline the patching experience with automation and self-service, to minimize downtime. And greater visibility into employee devices can help organizations ensure staff is equipped for success with the latest kit.

Above and beyond

As a pioneer of XEM, it should come as no surprise that Tanium is a strong advocate of converged endpoint management. Through IDC’s research, we can see that organizations are not only achieving more with XEM but specifically with the Tanium platform and its customer support team.

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To find out more about the benefits of XEM and Tanium, read the full white paper from IDC.