Table of Contents
- Summary
- Market Categories and Deployment Types
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About Paul Stringfellow
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Endpoint management is one of the most significant challenges in the enterprise today. The world continues to change, with increasingly large percentages of the workforce distributed geographically and needing the flexibility to work from anywhere. To remain competitive, businesses must give users access to the services they require to do their jobs effectively.
However, flexibility comes with significant risk, as it demands that organizations allow access to a major business asset—their data—to a widely distributed, high-risk environment of devices and locations. Enterprises, therefore, must solve two issues: how to provide users with an effective and flexible working environment with access to the apps and data they need, and how to do so without compromising security and control of business-critical data assets.
The answer to this challenge is the development of a comprehensive endpoint management strategy, usually one that is underpinned by a unified endpoint management (UEM) solution. These tools enable organizations to fully manage the lifecycle of their endpoint devices. This management starts with initial enrollment of a device, when the tools the UEM solution can deploy standardize security and controls, continues throughout the device’s operational life, ensuring it remains operational and secure, and ends as it is decommissioned, with all the organization’s information, sensitive or otherwise, effectively removed from the device.
Traditionally, UEM solutions provided organizations with asset management, software delivery, patching, and basic controls. However, the changing demands of an ever-widening range of endpoints means that these solutions must also evolve to meet new needs. In this update, we explore what businesses need from these solutions today. Now, they must not only track a company’s assets but secure them, and more importantly, secure the business in the process. UEM solutions need to know where all the endpoints are, how they are behaving, and whether they present security risk when they access applications and data. These ever-increasing demands around endpoint security are driving the rise of unified endpoint security (UES) solutions to further enhance endpoint management capabilities.
The range and number of endpoints in organizations today, left unmanaged, present a significant risk. Effective ways must be found to manage them because failure to do so puts the business at risk, impacts productivity, and increases operational costs.
This GigaOm Radar report highlights key UEM vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating UEM Solutions,” we describe in more detail the key features and metrics that are used to evaluate vendors in this market.
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.
Solution Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.