Endpoint Management Selection Guide

Streamline your organizational approach to selecting a right-sized endpoint management platform.

Endpoint Management Selection Guide

Streamline your organizational approach toward the selection of a right-sized endpoint management platform.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst Perspective

Revolutionize your endpoint management with a proper tool selection approach

The endpoint management market has an ever-expanding and highly competitive landscape. The market has undergone tremendous evolution in past years, from device management to application deployments and security management. The COVID-19 pandemic forced organizations to service employees and end users remotely while making sure corporate data is safe and user satisfaction doesn't get negatively affected. In the meantime, vendors were forced to leverage technology enhancements to satisfy such requirements.

That being said, endpoint management solutions have become more complex, with many options to manage operating systems and run applications for relevant user groups. With the work-from-anywhere model, customer support is even more important than before, as a remote workforce may face more issues than before, or enterprises may want to ensure more compliance with policies.

Moreover, the market has become more complex, with lots of added capabilities. Some features may not be beneficial to corporations, and with a poor market validation, businesses may end up paying for some capabilities that are not useful.

In this blueprint, we help you quickly define your requirements for endpoint management and narrow down a list to find the solutions that fulfill your use cases.

Mahmoud Ramin, PhD
Senior Research Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Endpoint management solutions are becoming increasingly essential – deploying the right devices and applications to the right users and zero-touch provisioning are indispensable parts of a holistic strategy for improving customers' experience. However, selecting the right-sized platform that aligns with your requirements is a big challenge.

Following improvements in end-user computation strategies, selection of the right endpoint management solution is a crucial next step in delivering concrete business value.

Common Obstacles

Despite the importance of selecting the right endpoint management platform, many organizations struggle to define an approach to picking the most appropriate vendor and rolling out the solution in an effective and cost-efficient manner. There are many options available, which can cause business and IT leaders to feel lost.

The endpoint management market is evolving quickly, making the selection process tedious. On top of that, IT has a hard time defining their needs and aligning solution features with their requirements.

Info-Tech's Approach

Determine what you require from an endpoint management solution.

Review the market space and product offerings, and compare the capabilities of key players.

Create a use case – use top-level requirements to determine use cases and short-list vendors.

Conduct a formal process for interviewing vendors, using Info-Tech's templates to select the best platform for your requirements.

Info-Tech Insight

Investigate vendors' roadmaps to figure out which of the candidate platforms can fulfill your long-term requirements without any unnecessary investment in features that are not currently useful for you. Make sure you don't purchase capabilities that you will never use.

What are endpoint management platforms?

Our definition: Endpoint management solutions are platforms that enable IT with appropriate provisioning, security, monitoring, and updating endpoints to ensure that they are in good health. Typical examples of endpoints are laptops, computers, wearable devices, tablets, smart phones, servers, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

First, understand differences between mobile management solutions

• Endpoint management solutions monitor and control the status of endpoints. They help IT manage and control their environment and provide top-notch customer service.
• These solutions ensure a seamless and efficient problem management, software updates and remediations in a secure environment.
• Endpoint management solutions have evolved very quickly to satisfy IT and user needs:
• Mobile Device Management (MDM) helps with controlling features of a device.
• Enterprise Mobile Management (EMM) controls everything in a device.
• Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) manages all endpoints.

Endpoint management includes:

• Device management
• Device configuration
• Device monitoring
• Device security

Info-Tech Insight

As endpoint management encompasses a broad range of solution categories including MDM, EMM, and UEM, look for your real requirements. Don't pay for something that you won't end up using.

As UEM covers all of MDM and EMM capabilities, we overview market trends of UEM in this blueprint to give you an overall view of market in this space.

Your challenge: Endpoint management has evolved significantly over the past few years, which makes software selection overwhelming

Additional challenges occur in securing endpoints

A rise in the number of attacks on cloud services creates a need to leverage endpoint management solutions

MarketsandMarkets predicted that global cloud infrastructure services would increase from US$73 billion in 2019 to US$166.6 billion in 2024 (2019).

A study by the Ponemon Institute showed that 68% of respondents believe that security attacks increased over the past 12 months (2020).

The study reveals that over half of IT security professionals who participated in the survey believe that organizations are not very efficient in securing their endpoints, mainly because they're not efficient in detecting attacks.

IT professionals would like to link endpoint management and security platforms to unify visibility and control, to determine potential risks to endpoints, and to manage them in a single solution.

Businesses will continue to be compromised by the vulnerabilities of cloud services, which pose a challenge to organizations trying to maintain control of their data.

Trends in endpoint management have been undergoing a tremendous change

In 2020, about 5.2 million users subscribed to mobile services, and smartphones accounted for 65% of connections. This will increase to 80% by 2025.
Source: Fortune Business Insights, 2021

Info-Tech's methodology for selecting a right-sized endpoint management platform

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

The endpoint management purchase process should be broken into segments:

1. Endpoint management vendor shortlisting with this buyer's guide
2. Structured approach to selection
3. Contract review

Info-Tech's approach

Complementary research:

Create a quick business case and requirements document to align stakeholders to your vision with Info-Tech's Rapid Application Selection Framework.
See what your peers are saying about these vendors at SoftwareReviews.com.