By Tom Schmidt
In today's challenging business environment, change is the only constant. Whether it's seizing a new corporate opportunity, complying with a new regulatory mandate, or ensuring that client devices are up-to-date and properly patched, change defines the very essence of today's enterprise. Sustaining a competitive edge, in fact, is all about how you manage change. This article looks at how maintaining consistent and optimized clients that comply with corporate standards enables you to manage change in a predictable way.
The evolving enterprise environment
Today's enterprise environment is increasingly heterogeneous and highly distributed. As a result, keeping client devices secure, available, and compliant with established corporate standards is more of a challenge than ever before. Think about it: IT departments are charged with discovering, provisioning, distributing, configuring, patching, and updating operating systems and applications for a wide range of clients -- including mobile and remote devices -- throughout the IT infrastructure. And these tasks are becoming more critical every day.
At the same time, IT departments find themselves operating in an increasingly hostile threat environment. Attackers are launching increasingly sophisticated attacks in an effort to compromise the integrity of corporate information.
Client resilience
Given such an environment, "client resilience" is the key to helping ensure that client devices are secure, available, and compliant with corporate standards - from acquisition to disposal. What does client resilience mean? It means the ability to gain control of the IT environment and getting it to the point where, regardless of what it may be exposed to, it continues to run and allows business to continue to thrive. It means reducing the complexity and cost of managing the lifecycle of client devices, automating manual tasks (such as deploying and configuring client firewall and anti-spyware software), rolling out new devices, managing software patches, and retiring client devices. Ultimately, it means fearlessly managing change.
What does client resilience look like in action? Let's consider some real-world scenarios.
Keeping costs down, clients up and running
As a service department within your organization, the IT department is expected to provide timely resolution to every incident that comes into the help desk, while at the same time minimizing the costs involved with providing this service. With industry analysts claiming that 70% of the total cost of owning a client device is in support and maintenance, it's no surprise that IT is often first in line when it comes to budget cuts. Client resilience helps reduce overall IT costs by automating repetitive tasks so help desk calls can be resolved by first-level technicians. It helps ensure that any client management task is automated and delivered regardless of where client devices reside.
Client resilience also helps reduce client devices' exposure to security risks. After all, if not well managed, controlled, and kept in compliance, unsuspecting client devices can carry and pass on threats and vulnerabilities throughout your organization. Client resilience means you have the tools to manage and control devices, helping you keep your infrastructure and business up and running, no matter what happens.
When disruptions do occur, client resilience helps an enterprise get restarted and restored to the "moment before" state as rapidly as possible - meaning in minutes rather than hours. However, fast and reliable remote system recovery is only possible if client devices are maintained consistently. Having consistency ensures that you manage in a predictable way and control how change will impact your client environment.
Client resilience offers the best way for enterprises to remain agile while at the same time reducing exposure to risk. It provides the ability to understand the state of your client devices, act quickly when clients need attention, and implement controls to ensure that clients are consistent and compliant with corporate standards.
Conclusion
Evolving security threats, changing compliance requirements, ongoing pressure to establish a strong ROI case for IT purchases -- these are challenges facing IT departments everywhere. In this ceaselessly changing environment, client resilience is essential. Client resilience enables you to fearlessly manage change and help ensure your business stays up, running, and growing, no matter what happens.
Tom Schmidt writes frequently about information security topics. He has more than 15 years' experience as a writer and editor in high-tech publishing.