Think of endpoint management as a remote control that simplifies the operation of various digital devices in your home, such as TVs, sound systems and ACs. Its centralized approach allows for efficient and unified control from a single location.

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This article will help you understand what endpoint management is, its features, benefits and importance in maintaining your organization’s security posture. We’ll also discuss how efficient endpoint management and endpoint security software can streamline your cybersecurity operations together.

Article Roadmap:

• What Is Endpoint Management?
• Importance
• Endpoint Management Policies
• Primary Benefits
• Components
• MDM vs. EMM vs. UEM
• How To Choose the Best Solution
• Next Steps

What Is Endpoint Management?

Endpoint management is a cybersecurity approach that allows you to supervise and authenticate access rights while enforcing security policies for your network’s endpoints. It helps you protect your digital assets from outsider and insider threats.

Both network administrators and cybersecurity professionals use endpoint management to:

• Block unauthorized access to the network through endpoint devices, both cloud-based and on-premise.
• Implement cybersecurity policies and tools with constant endpoint monitoring.
• Manage endpoints from one location through a central console and dashboard.

What Is UEM?

Unified endpoint management (UEM) is a comprehensive set of tools that allows you to control and manage endpoint security from a centralized console. It’s an evolution and combination of mobile device management (MDM), enterprise mobility management (EMM) and traditional client management tools.

A typical UEM solution enhances the scope of device administration and data security through fundamental abilities like threat detection, mitigation and remediation, security updates, software and OS deployment, patch management, logging, mobile device management, device compliance, remote control options and remote wiping of lost or stolen devices.

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Importance

Endpoint management is crucial in today’s IT landscape because of the growing number of remote devices connected to corporate networks and digital work environments. To safeguard these digital assets against cyber threats, a unified cybersecurity approach is evolving rapidly.

Morten Kjaersgaard, Founder and CEO of Heimdal, told us in an interview:

The cybersecurity industry is shifting towards more unified and comprehensive solutions to protect against evolving threats. The increasing sophistication in attacks and the shift towards malwareless attacks underscore the need for a unified security strategy that can address both traditional malware and emerging threats.”

Let’s see how endpoint management can improve your business’ endpoint security and ensure complete control over your endpoints:

Data Security

It helps secure devices against a variety of threats, including malware, ransomware, phishing attacks and data breaches. You can ensure that all devices are up-to-date with the latest security patches along with antivirus and anti-malware protection.

Endpoint management also facilitates the implementation and adaptation of security best practices, significantly reducing vulnerability to cyberattacks.

Patches and Updates

You can ensure constant endpoint monitoring and scan devices for software updates, vulnerabilities and other firmware issues. Endpoint management platforms provide timely patches wherever required. Updated software helps you remove vulnerabilities and minimize intrusion risks.

Control and Visibility

A unified dashboard enables you to track the status and health of all devices connected to the network. This in-depth visibility helps identify and respond to issues, monitor compliance, and make informed decisions about your security and IT policies.

New Device Enrollment

With the rapid development of BYOD policies, the administration of endpoints has become much more complicated. You can simplify the process by offering a self-enrolling portal for new users. It scans and approves all new and unknown devices that want to connect to your network.

Incident Response

In the event of a security incident, having an effective endpoint management system in place can expedite the response and recovery process. It allows you to quickly identify affected systems and provides robust remediation measures. You can also contain infected applications by blocking them or restricting access.

With centrally managed capabilities, it can also provide greater visibility into all endpoints to better monitor health, device usage, activities and vulnerabilities requiring patch updates.

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Endpoint Management Policies

Endpoint management policies form the backbone of a secure and well-organized IT infrastructure. They include:

Compliance Policies

These comprehensive policies include enrollment, authentication and security standards. They govern procedures for enrolling devices in the network with robust protection, such as multi-factor authentication and encrypted software-based IDs, to ensure that they meet security requirements like GDPR or HIPAA.

Remote Device Management

This policy helps you control and manage access to the corporate network for all remote devices and define access conditions. It includes VPN requirements, network segmentation and network traffic monitoring.

Zero Trust Security Framework

Implementing a zero trust approach enables you to restrict device access, whether inside or outside the network, and consistently verify their authenticity. It requires strict authentication, constant validation of device compliance and regular endpoint monitoring for all devices.

Application Management

Application management involves defining clear rules for allowed and prohibited applications and focusing on enterprise-approved apps. It also governs policies for regular updates and patching to safeguard against new vulnerabilities.

Primary Benefits

Integrating management tools, enterprise resource planning software and third-party platforms into one software provides better endpoint monitoring, control and management. Here are the key benefits that you can derive from these tools:

Maintain Compliance

Companies dealing with digital assets must comply with data privacy laws. With various regulations governing data privacy and security, endpoint management ensures that all devices comply with GDPR, HIPAA or PCI-DSS regulations. It helps you avoid legal issues and hefty fines.

Enhance Cyber Security

The centralized security approach and single security protocol let IT teams monitor suspicious activities across all devices and manage security. It helps enforce security policies at various levels to ensure a strict defense against all threats. Also, IT admins can provide personalized access to corporate data and specific applications according to location, usage patterns and business roles.

Improve User Experience

The prime goal of deploying a security solution is to improve user experience and productivity without compromising security, and one of these solutions fulfills just that. It eliminates the need to manage endpoints using multiple tools, creating a consistent user experience and increasing productivity.

Reduce Costs

To minimize IT overhead costs and hardware expenses, you can automate several IT processes and tasks, including endpoint auditing, provisioning and data loss prevention functions.

You can also optimize hardware and software resource utilization to improve performance and extend the life of devices, freeing up your IT staff to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Enhance Business Decision-Making

Get automated data analysis reports to identify the areas that need course correction or better policies. Access business analytics tools to interpret and process data to stay on top of security issues.

You can use this data later to identify threats and prepare for the impact. Complete visibility and insights make tracking data and generating customized reports convenient.

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Components

Endpoint management tools include mobile device management (MDM), enterprise mobility management (EMM) and UEM systems. Before delving into their details, let’s have a look at some of the most vital components of endpoint management tools:

Comprehensive Security and Privacy

Complete security and privacy for data, applications and connections are vital for protecting your critical assets. Some solutions support secure VPN connections, while others rely on data and container encryption. Certain software platforms also include application containerization methods to separate users from corporate data and apps.

Many endpoint management tools have threat monitoring and mitigation capabilities to continuously monitor security breaches and malware and provide necessary remediation guidance to restore affected systems.

Configuration Management

Endpoint configuration requires a significant amount of time and resources. Incorporating custom settings, user preferences and preferred applications can further complicate the process.

This module automatically manages endpoint settings and configurations to ensure consistency across the organization. After connecting with a cloud service, all devices automatically configure the UEM solution.

Enrollment and Deployment

Unlike traditional deployment processes, endpoint management solutions offer a much simpler and hassle-free approach. All operating systems, including iOS, Android and Windows, provide automated provisioning and enrollment. Windows Autopilot and Apple’s Automated Device Enrollment are great examples.

Inventory Management

It enables you to keep track of all endpoints within the organization. This includes not only identifying and documenting all devices but also staying informed about hardware specifications, installed software, operating system versions and other relevant details.

Multi-Device Support

An ideal solution supports a wide variety of devices and vendors. A common platform for computers, mobile devices, IoT devices and other connected hardware is crucial for protecting the entire security infrastructure. With multi-device support, your endpoint management solution can smoothly detect and identify every type of device brought in by employees.

AI and Machine Learning Integration

Advanced technologies are immensely transforming the way IT industries work. With no exception, these solutions also harness the power of AI and machine learning integrations to extend deeper insights and contextual analytics to your overall security approach. Security teams can safeguard their environment and increase productivity by receiving recommendations on industry policies, malicious threats and alerts.

Machine learning-based security provides a zero-trust framework that relies on effective multi-factor authentication and authorization, analytics and encryption and file-system level permissions to prevent critical data loss. Enabling dynamic access rules based on the user’s identity, devices and context can ensure that legitimate users and applications gain access to the protection surface.

Backup and Recovery

You can automatically backup and store critical data to ensure minimum or no loss. Even after a severe attack or data breach, the platform quickly performs data recovery to restore data integrity and availability.

Identity and Access Management

These solutions let you control user and device access based on valid accounts and security policies that include multi-level encryption, custom password requirements and more. Moreover, a password-less authentication feature can increase user productivity by allowing one-time authentication before moving to other authentication factors like user, device and location authentication.

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MDM vs. EMM vs. UEM

These different mobility management tools address data security and privacy concerns. However, they vary significantly from each other. It’s beneficial to know the differences between them to simplify your mobility strategy and identify the perfect fit for your organization.

MDM is a device-centric approach that remotely secures, manages and tracks employee or corporate-owned devices, such as smartphones and tablets, across multiple OS platforms. MDM consoles let you remotely lock, track and monitor lost or stolen devices. However, this model doesn’t support BYOD flexibility. Features of MDM include:

• Remote access
• Location tracking
• Real-time monitoring and reporting
• Device enrollment
• Security and lockdown

EMM is an app and content-centric approach that expands MDM’s capabilities. It allows employees to enroll their own devices into corporate resources. MDM can manage device features, but EMM manages the entire device by providing policy compliance, data and document security and app customization. Its features are:

• Mobile app
• Content management
• Containerization
• App wrapping

UEM is replacing MDM and EMM to keep up with the ever-changing mobile landscape. It is an emerging cloud-based mobility management system that can manage modern operating systems, legacy devices and all endpoints, including mobile, fixed, wearable and IoT devices, through a single platform. UEM solutions offer mobile device, application, content and threat management, containerization and identity and access management.

Regarding the unified UEM approach, Andrei Hinodache, Cybersecurity Speaker & Community Leader at Heimdal, said:

Aside from the massive reduction of overhead, you now have multiple layers talking to each other and providing multiplier value that previously was achieved by implementing extra tools (SIEM, SOAR, etc..) or by team members collecting information, correlating and then agreeing on the next steps, the ladder being again conducted from multiple management consoles, thus again reducing the time to remediate a certain event.”

How To Choose the Best Endpoint Management Solution

While choosing the perfect software can be overwhelming, you must deploy the most appropriate one. You can start your software evaluation strategy by making a requirement list first and then looking for all the required features in your preferred solution. Consider asking these questions to choose the best solution:

• Does the software support all operating systems?
• How many endpoints do we need to secure?
• What kind of integrations does the solution offer?
• Does the software integrate with on-premise and cloud-based modules?
• Do we have the support staff to maintain the software?
• What kind of training do we need for our employees?

To further aid you in your search, Hinodache recommended considering these four parameters during software evaluation:

• How much work volume and time goes into implementing the solution — We don’t want to spend four months and five people working on this.
• How user-friendly is the platform — We don’t want to turn what should be a 1-3 hours training session into a college degree.
• How much time goes into operating the platform to perform the above-mentioned use cases — Time is of the essence now. If we keep our teams pushing buttons all day long, we’re not approaching this from a good angle.
• How future-ready this is — Think in terms of current capabilities and development roadmap. You want to partner up with a provider that looks ahead.

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Next Steps

There are plenty of endpoint management vendors available in the market, and selecting the right solution can be a daunting task. You must understand your business needs and requirements before investing in a system to strengthen your organization’s productivity and ROI.

With all the factors and cost considerations in mind, make sure you choose an appropriate solution so you don’t have to jeopardize your enterprise’s safety and reputation.

If you need further help in software selection, check out our free comparison report for actionable insights on leading security systems. It consists of top industry leaders, the highest-rated modules and detailed user reviews.

Which solution do you use for ensuring endpoint security and management? Do let us know by leaving a comment below!

SME Contributors

Morten Kjaersgaard is the visionary CEO of Denmark-based Heimdal®, an AI-powered cybersecurity company with a global reach, safeguarding 15,000 businesses from 260+ million cyberattacks. With a corporate marketing background, Morten bridges cybersecurity intricacies with business goals.

He’s a cybersecurity advocate, event speaker and insightful blog contributor. Morten doesn’t settle for the status quo, pushing organizations to embrace bold, revolutionary approaches.

Andrei Hinodache is an enthusiastic cybersecurity speaker and community leader with over five years of hands-on experience in the industry. At Heimdal®, he catalyzed growth, established the pre-sales engineering department, led over 5000 meetings and implemented successful strategies in about 1000 cases. Known for his no-nonsense approach, he cuts through the noise and gets straight to the core of cybersecurity challenges.