2020 was a year of tremendous dejection and disruption.
Imagine if you had told your organization’s upper management that they had to switch their 10,000 or 20,000 strong corporate office to the virtual world back in January 2020.
They would have flipped.
Despite all the fear and loss that 2020 brought, we capitalized on the opportunities. And even a year later, there are still possibilities galore. Let’s look at how endpoint management and security will shape up in 2021, and the trends they’ll set moving forward.
#1 Work from home, BYOD, and the growth of remote work
This is perhaps the most obvious trend. Last year, even companies that had been against a work-from-home policy were compelled to usher in the remote work revolution overnight. We are likely to go through 2021 with the same remote work setup before people start coming back into offices in a normal way. As a result, companies are swooping in on the opportunity to provide better endpoint management and security tools to enable virtual workspaces.
#2 Cloud-first, on-premises second
Managing endpoints and automating endpoint tasks from the cloud is not a choice anymore. This proactive, bold transformation from an on-premises solution to the cloud is obvious given the dominance of remote work. With a workforce that’s more scattered than ever, adopting a hybrid, multi-cloud setup will help integrate management and security tools.
#3 Cyberattack prevention and data threat remediation
Your IT team secured laptops, metered the corporate network, and vetted employees’ favorite apps back when everyone worked in the office. However, can they uphold the same level of stringent security for employees’ diverse, low-end devices and routers at home? According to a report by Barracuda Networks, pandemic-related phishing attacks rose by 667 percent at the onset of the pandemic. What does that mean? Threat actors, aka the bad guys, are less keen on attacking organizations and more interested in hacking your personal stuff. The work-from-home disruption is set to drive more attention to endpoint security and adopting a Zero Trust model.
Privacy and compliance
We’re in a world where privacy plays a major deciding factor in anything we use. The WhatsApp-Signal tug-of-war indicates that people have started to take privacy and compliance seriously. Seamless private or public cloud connectivity is incomplete without infrastructure that adheres to business compliance and privacy.
Operational cost cuts
Companies have learned to grow lean following cost cuts and immense pressure on budgets. While shrinking operational costs is the prime objective of every boardroom agenda, companies have used 2020 to grow leaner and rethink ways to utilize their resources. However, becoming more digitally collaborative with endpoint management and security will come at a steep price, since quickly adopting and adapting to a new technology leads to many failures. For instance, Gartner predicts that “through 2024, 80 percent of companies that are unaware of the mistakes made in their cloud adoption will overspend by 20 to 50 percent.”
If your organization is looking for a cost-effective unified endpoint management solution that ensures productivity, automates patching, and remediates cyberthreats, try out Desktop Central for 30 days to manage unlimited endpoints for free.
** Optrics Inc. is an Authorized ManageEngine partner
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