Managing Devices—Both Near and Far

Advancing technology has done wonders for enterprise productivity. Today, employees can work virtually anywhere at any time—in their offices, at remote sites, from home, in hotels, and on trains and planes. But these advances come with a cost. Managing and protecting user devices that may be in the conference room down the hall or halfway around the world for all you know is an enormous challenge—one that's becoming more difficult to overcome each day, as new device types and access methods appear on scene.

Device Management: One Size Fits All
To manage and protect end-user devices over the LAN and across the Internet, many companies are adopting iPass Device Management (formerly Endpoint Policy Management). Enterprise IT staff use Device Management to concentrate and automate control of all their systems, including those difficult-to-administer remote and mobile endpoints.

Device Management automates a wide range of systems management tasks as part of the connection process. As a result, IT staff can implement a comprehensive array of automated functions that includes device discovery, hardware and software inventory, vulnerability assessment, software distribution and management reporting, among others.

"These days, we don't manually install anything," said Drew Nash, manager of Plantronics, UK help desk. "Device Management handles everything from a registry fix to distributing the Microsoft Office package in its entirety. Its packaging capabilities obviate the need for users to have local administrative rights for installing their own software."

Version 7.5: It's More of a Good Thing
iPass recently released a new version of Device Management—version 7.5. This latest release adds tools for administering devices however they connect and makes major strides in helping customers better manage their mobility costs. Notable features of version 7.5 include:

• Extended management of handheld devices
• Distribution of non-security patches
• Improved LAN management

Extending Management of Handheld Devices
The latest release of Device Management extends the product's functionality to handheld systems running Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone Edition—one of today's fastest-growing categories of mobile devices (Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC and earlier versions are already supported). IT staff have at their disposal a host of scripting commands, the ability to force the device's agent scan, and additional hardware and software inventory reports. An extensible tools menu also allows you to add custom commands.

Distributing Non-Security Patches
While it's true that the one of the top uses for Device Management is distributing Microsoft security patches, the solution is equally suited to broad-based patching. Version 7.5 extends patch management to include non-security patches and additional applications including SQL Server, Adobe Acrobat, Macromedia Flash, Winzip, Firefox and others.

The recent Windows Daylight Saving Time (DST) patch is just such an example of a non-security patch—and a newsworthy one at that. While setting your clocks ahead by an hour might not seem daunting, this year's time change caused frustration for IT administrators because it took place three weeks early. Windows operating systems, calendar programs and a host of other applications have the ability to switch over to DST automatically, but needed to be patched so that they would do so on the correct day. The challenging part for IT was that this required machines to be individually patched to reflect the move of DST from the first Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March.

With iPass Device Management, updating every system and multiple applications on each is made easy. Patches are available directly through the Device Management console—even ones that don't have an associated security bulletin and are not assigned a severity by Microsoft. Best of all, the whole process is automated. Device Management quickly assess vulnerabilities and targets patch deployments to groups of users or systems based on criteria determined by IT. Patches like the one for Daylight Savings Time are easily deployed to all systems—remote, mobile and local—eliminating the hassle of touching machines individually.

Don't Forget—We Do LAN Management, Too
Device Management was initially designed to handle remote and mobile systems management. However, many customers have discovered that it's also great for managing desktop and laptop systems on the company LAN. If your company is looking to consolidate its systems management solutions—and you may find yourself with four or even five different ones these days—Device Management excels in mixed computing environments where managing desktops, laptops and handhelds is equally important.

"The biggest selling point for us was that Device Management could manage all our systems," said Nash. "It manages our remote systems, regardless of where they were in the world. It also manages our fixed-LAN products. That's exactly what we wanted. It's incredibly powerful, yet very easy to use."

Of course, if you're happy to maintain multiple solutions, Device Management can always be easily implemented as a complementary technology for simply managing remote and mobile devices.

Go Ahead—Dig a Little Deeper
This article only scratches the surface of Device Management's capabilities and its benefits to enterprises. For more information, be sure to visit our Device Management page. You'll learn more ways to increase IT productivity, improve endpoint protection and lower infrastructure management costs.