The previous two years have seen mobility administration tackle a larger significance than ever within the enterprise. As distant and hybrid work fashions take maintain at many organizations, “mobility management” has expanded its which means from administration of cell gadgets to administration of all gadgets utilized by cell staff, wherever they occur to be working from.Unified endpoint administration (UEM) has turn out to be a strategic expertise on the middle of firms’ efforts to manage this more and more advanced atmosphere. Essentially combining enterprise mobility administration (EMM) instruments with PC administration instruments, UEM platforms assist firms handle and defend a spread of gadgets together with smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computer systems throughout a number of working methods — all from a unified interface.“With remote and hybrid work here to stay, having a cloud-powered, unified endpoint strategy and toolset is key to staying ahead of updates and security risks,” says Dan Wilson, senior director and analyst at analysis agency Gartner. “We are also seeing an increase in interest around UEM tools managing macOS and Linux endpoints, as part of continued efforts to consolidate tools, teams, and associated skills.”What the UEM market appears to be like likeThe UEM market is dominated by a few dozen main distributors. It’s not seeing many new gamers enter the fray, Wilson says. “However, [smaller] vendors offering products and capabilities for specific use cases are gaining attention,” he says.Such use instances embrace managing frontline employee gadgets, sensors and sensible gadgets utilized in logistics and transportation, kiosk gadgets, Internet of Things (IoT) endpoints, industrial drones, and wearables, he says. “These are not often available from the mainstream UEM tools,” Wilson says.[ How to choose the right UEM platform ] The few new entrants into the UEM market are typically firms centered on small and midsized companies (SMBs), says Andrew Hewitt, senior analyst at Forrester Research. “We expect that market to fundamentally transform into a new market in the next two to three years,” Hewitt says. “What that looks like is hard to say at this point.” Pricing of UEM platforms stays roughly steady, Hewitt says. “I still routinely see anywhere between $1 and $10 per user per month,” he says. “There’s a mix of both per-user and per-device pricing out there, with per-user pricing increasingly common. However, I don’t see major changes when it comes to pricing. One new trend is providing specific pricing for frontline workers, which a few of the UEM providers now have today.” While checklist costs for UEM platforms will not be altering, some distributors are getting extra aggressive with reductions, Wilson says. “New SKUs and bundles are being created to attract smaller or budget-conscious customers,” he says. [ Free download: UEM vendor comparison chart 2022 ] Emerging tendencies for 2022 Forrester sees just a few main tendencies rising for UEM this 12 months, Hewitt says. One is the rise of person expertise administration inside UEM instruments. The use of end-user expertise monitoring (EUEM) will turn out to be extra frequent amongst organizations, he says. This entails amassing telemetry from endpoints for the needs of benchmarking end-user expertise, remediating points, and amassing worker suggestions. “As enterprises continue to try to improve employee experience for hybrid work, these experience management capabilities will become increasingly useful, especially when combined with existing tools in house,” Hewitt says. Another development Hewitt notes is an acceleration of “modern management,” a technique to handle endpoints in a unified approach with out compromising the safety of the endpoints. “The pandemic forced many IT decision makers to modernize their endpoint management strategies to better serve remote workers,” he says. “We’re now seeing large moves to support modern management, and the UEM vendors are making it increasingly easy to do so with new migration tools.” In addition to those developments, Hewitt expects to see a larger give attention to remote-first administration capabilities with UEM, “specifically when it comes to visibility over at-home endpoints and improved patching via the internet,” he says. “I’d also expect to see a greater focus on improving deployment automation, providing a fully automated deployment service that includes areas previously not included, such as BIOS [basic input/output system] configuration, user personalization, and third-party app deployment,” he says. Gartner’s Wilson factors to lots of the identical tendencies. “We anticipate leading UEM tools will continue to try to consolidate workloads and expand features to include experience management, automation, patching, vulnerability and risk management, configuration management, secure remote access, and remote control,” he says. Security and endpoint administration uniteAnother main development Forrester emphasizes for 2022 is the continued convergence of endpoint administration and endpoint safety. Some UEM distributors have acquired endpoint detection and response (EDR) suppliers lately, Hewitt notes. “In addition to integrating those tools, we’re seeing more interest among vendors to offer combined management and security capabilities within a single platform,” he says. What this implies for patrons is extra consolidation of instruments, fewer brokers — software program instruments that monitor threats and vulnerabilities — on endpoint gadgets, and a rising want to enhance collaboration between IT operations and safety groups, Hewitt says. Phil Hochmuth, program vp, enterprise mobility at IDC, highlights the unification development as properly. PC administration expertise will more and more appear to be cell machine administration (MDM) as fashionable endpoint administration adopts MDM protocols and architectures for software program supply, he says. “Automated unified endpoint patching — especially third-party app patching — will be difficult to achieve,” Hochmuth says. “Endpoint management teams will increasingly take on endpoint security roles as this line blurs. To address these trends, we’re advising enterprises to keep ‘traditional’ endpoint options open for end-user endpoint management, with an eye toward modern management.” IDC is emphasizing the significance of a “single pane of glass” performance throughout a number of working methods and machine type elements, Hochmuth says. “We’re seeing and encouraging more integration of UEM technology into both end-user computing operations teams and security operations,” he says.AI, ML, and automation on the riseMobility specialists count on synthetic intelligence (AI), machine studying (ML), and automation to play more and more necessary roles in UEM platforms. “Analytics is becoming an increasingly popular feature being introduced by UEM vendors,” Hochmuth says. “This is the ability to gather data and telemetry from managed endpoints and putting that data into usable reports and workflows driven by automation and AI.” Because AI and ML capabilities are comparatively new, “it will take time to prove to IT administrators that the insights and recommendations [made by AI/ML] are complete, accurate, and reliable,” Wilson says. “But the sky is the limit on what can be done to eliminate repeatable, mundane tasks. We also expect to see ML play into better risk and vulnerability assessment to drive better prioritization of and eventual automation of software updates and patching.” There is an incredible want for self-healing of endpoint gadgets right this moment, “and AI plays a large role in that by bringing the endpoint back into compliance with its initial configuration,” Hewitt says. “We also see an AI play when it comes to proactively improving experience or preventing issues from happening that disrupt employees.” This would require vital coordination and historic information of person conduct, Hewitt says, “but it’s something that will improve enterprises’ ability to predict and solve issues before they happen.” Read subsequent: This story was initially printed in June 2015 and most just lately up to date in May 2022. Click by way of to subsequent pages to see how mobility administration has advanced over time.
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