The last year has been challenging for businesses everywhere. As they have navigated the transition away from traditional brick-and-mortar offices to a highly distributed workforce, the focus has been on maintaining productivity.
This shift to a more agile working environment had already been growing, but the pandemic was a catalyst to accelerate the movement. As a result, organizations across most business sectors embraced remote working and stood up infrastructure and tools to ensure that employees had the ability to remain productive using secure devices when working from home.
Mobility meets cloud
With flexible working environments expected to continue for years to come, businesses and their IT teams are now looking at the next phase to figure out how their technology stack may change. One thing we can expect is that the needs of an agile workforce will continue to drive the adoption of more cloud services. A number of workers will return to an office environment, while others will work from home, from an airport or hotel, or even while riding public transportation.
The goal of the IT team will be to provide office workers and mobile workers the same quality experience, with easy, reliable and secure access to the applications, data and services they may need, regardless of location, device or OS.
As employees continue to work from their homes in record numbers (and bad actors increasingly target them through phishing and other schemes), the sudden need for tools that keep employees and their devices secure and up to date has skyrocketed.
The long game
This is where Microsoft steps in. Although it is not new to the space, the last decade has seen Microsoft Intune – and later Microsoft Endpoint Manager – become the gold standards in device management tools. Much of the transition to a work-from-home environment was made possible in large part thanks to robust cloud-based platforms such as Endpoint Manager, which helped keep end-user devices updated and secure.
Endpoint Manager is designed to make it easier for IT admins to provision, deploy, manage and secure endpoints such as desktops and mobile devices and their applications. This effectively protects corporate data while still allowing employees to do their jobs. Endpoint Manager combines mobile device management (MDM) capabilities with mobile application management (MAM) functionality.
Despite its roots as a Microsoft product, Endpoint Manager is able to manage devices running competing operating systems, such as Android and MacOS. Through Endpoint Manager’s console, policy controls, rules and access privileges can be applied down to the individual employee or team, all based on job function and access needs.
Maximizing Microsoft Endpoint Manager deployments
Rather than cobbling together a solution from multiple vendors, many organizations have found that adopting Microsoft Endpoint Manager is a very effective way of ensuring security and management over a distributed workforce’s devices. The platform gives IT teams on-premises and cloud management tools as well as co-management options to provision, deploy, manage and secure endpoints across any enterprise that mixes on-premise, IaaS and SaaS resources
In order to enable organizations like yours to secure their growing number of resources hosted across various infrastructures, alongside managing their devices, NetMotion and Microsoft Endpoint Manager have partnered in their offerings.
Microsoft recognizes the need for a modern, secure remote access solution to pair with its Intune offering, especially for those organizations transitioning from other UEM tools who can’t afford to sacrifice on security and experience. Therefore, Microsoft recommends NetMotion as the ideal VPN solution to leverage with Endpoint Manager.
Not only that, but Endpoint Manager now includes NetMotion’s class-leading network security platform as an option for any Intune-managed Android, iOS, MacOS and iPadOS device.
The benefits
- Get to SASE in seconds
The addition of NetMotion into the Endpoint Manager environment makes it incredibly easy for your IT administrators to deploy NetMotion invisibly, without any interaction or guesswork from end users. It’s a simple, quick and completely hassle-free way to ensure a Microsoft-recommended secure access experience for workers. It’s also an excellent way for you to get one step closer to SASE, in a matter of moments. - Optimize user experience
Alongside a seamless deployment experience, NetMotion and Endpoint Manager ensure a quality end user experience for your distributed workforce. Companies rely on NetMotion, not only for its VPN, software-defined perimeter and experience monitoring capabilities but also for its unique ability to persist and optimize the end user experience. Together with Intune, this ensures a remote access experience, without sacrifice. - Adopt ZTNA + conditional access
The NetMotion and Endpoint Manager integration provides a zero-trust security posture for your organization, thanks to Microsoft’s conditional access capabilities and NetMotion’s software-defined perimeter. The two solutions ensure that every access request is contextually evaluated in real time and is accepted at both the endpoint and the resource itself. Lateral network movement is prohibited with the ‘darkening’ of resources.
For more information, check out our Microsoft Endpoint Manager datasheet here.
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