“Work from Anywhere” is no longer an ambition, but an increasingly mundane business reality for organizations of all sizes. New research shows that remote/hybrid working and learning are trends that will persist. One study found that 51% of employees reported flexible working arrangements in their existing role, and 37% of organizations saw an increase in requests in the past six months alone (CIPD 2022).
Harnessing the potential of this new reality requires a shift in cultural norms and mindsets, coupled with the optimization of technology to enable critical outcomes in collaboration, productivity, work-life balance, retention/recruitment, as well as diversity, equality and inclusion. Expectations around the “wants and needs” of technology have also accelerated, to the extent that about 49% of employees report being frustrated with the technology provided by their employer, and 26% are considering leaving their jobs because of it (Ivanti 2022). At the same time, IT teams navigate increasing workload and complexity along with issues of “tool sprawl” (Jump Cloud 2022).
Four core priorities have emerged to optimize Work from Anywhere for IT users and IT professionals: performance, stability, security, and remote management.
It remains an absolute truth: performance matters! And this goes beyond your CPU; it’s about platform performance, which can be improved by bringing together PCIe 5, support for DDR5 and WiFi 6e, optimized for speed. And the software you use also takes advantage of that endpoint performance.
Stability is also critical, and not just for a single device, but across your entire IT domain, from builds to the operating system, apps, and firmware. Updating at a regular cadence is key, ideally monthly/quarterly, especially with graphics drivers, USB and WiFi. (Doing this incorrectly will result in performance issues, from video calls hanging to problems in your Excel spreadsheet.) By minimizing the volume and variants of drivers you need to support through standardization/consistency, you can reduce the amount of reduce the engineering work required -and thus reduce the risk. (More on better managing PC refresh predictability is available here.)
And with the rise of the data-driven organization, privacy issues, permissions and personalization have become increasingly important, with security risks escalating in speed, scope, sophistication and scale. These need to be addressed at three layers: below the operating system (usually the most difficult area to attack, but equally difficult to detect when a breach occurs), within the operating system, and through proactive threat detection technologies that do not affect the performance. This is especially critical given the vast inventory of assets IT teams must manage.
Finally, remote management is essential, especially with the increasing use of both proprietary and Bring Your Own Devices. 360-degree visibility and seamless integration are essential across the spectrum of processes, including equipment, validation, configuration, monitoring and analysis.
With its emphasis on the four pillars of performance, stability, security and manageability, Intel vPro is a prime example of holistic support for businesses in action. Intel® Hardware Shield provides comprehensive multi-layered security protection “out of the box”; By activating Intel® Active Management Technology, IT can manage and repair PCs remotely (with Intel® Endpoint Management Assistant for cloud management and remote support), while full platform validation ensures PC fleet stability. Combined, this enables secure support for today’s highly dispersed workforce with significant ROI cost savings (Forrester 2022).
Intel vPro is fully adaptable to different types of devices and users, which is vital when looking at the evolution of devices. While laptops have a one-to-one management model and have high visibility around issues with a person “behind the device”, the desktop plays a changing infrastructure role, but is less visible and increasingly built into other things, from collaboration spaces to Point of vending, ATMs and digital signage. So, in combination, Intel helps vPro deliver what IT needs and IT users want.
Learn more here.
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