Myths are cool. I heard a lot of myths and legends as bedtime stories when I was growing up, then studied them for years in high school and college.
But nowadays, most of the myths I hear are about endpoint management and how it’s too difficult, expensive, complex and limited. At KACE, we spend a lot of time and effort debunking those myths. We demonstrate the capabilities that go into rock-solid unified endpoint management (UEM) so that IT managers and system administrators can manage hundreds or thousands of desktops and mobile devices regardless of operating system.
Here are the biggest myths about UEM and enterprise mobility management:
Myth 1 – Like Odysseus, I don’t know where my people are or what they’re getting into. Nothing could keep track of them or manage their devices.
Odysseus struggled to keep track of his companions when they were raiding islands for supplies, poaching the gods’ cattle, thwarting the song of the Sirens, being turned into swine, getting trapped by a Cyclops or being eaten by Laestrygonians, whatever those are. He never knew what was going to hit him next. It was such a nightmare that the books don’t even mention all the mobile management problems he had.
Compared to all that, you should relax.
Besides your in-building co-workers, all you have are road warriors, workers-from-home and coffee shop dwellers. KACE can find and manage their devices, no matter where they are or what they’re doing. KACE includes VNC software for remote access and remote control so your help desk can be there without going there. You won’t need dedicated equipment at remote sites to support your far-flung users.
You can manage each device through deployment, upgrade and even removal of software and packages without bringing it into the building to touch it. KACE keeps your users and their devices inventoried from existing hardware sites, no matter where the devices are.
Myth 2 – Like the story of Thor and Thrym, I have to radically change the way I work and make myself miserable to put UEM in place.
Thor had to dress up like a bride and pretend he was going to marry Thrym. That’s a lot to ask, just to get a hammer back. It’s even more to ask if all you’re trying to do is implement mobile device security.
There’s a notion that you’ll have to purchase and install new, dedicated, platform-specific hardware to make UEM work, or that you’ll have to use a certain type of disk space. We talk to a lot of IT managers who think UEM will be the tail wagging the dog of how they run their department and infrastructure.
That’s a myth.
Once you’ve installed KACE, you can use existing hardware to pre-stage the packages you deploy to devices all over your network. You can use Windows, MacOS or Linux – whatever is already in place. You can deploy packages to or from servers, workstations, local drives, network drives – any storage device with disk space. KACE is designed for a diverse IT environment of devices running MacOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, etc. Better yet, service desk is included at no additional licensing cost.
Myth 3 – Like Orpheus, you need mad skills and tool expertise to make UEM work.
Orpheus played a mean lute and sang beautifully – beautifully enough to make friends and influence a three-headed dog in the land of the dead.
For rock-solid UEM you don’t need to play or sing music, and you don’t even need to be an expert in mobile device management tools or UEM software. KACE provides a simple solution that makes it easy to manage devices throughout the organization. Instead of working in multiple tools for functions as different as inventory, patching and software distribution, KACE allows you to perform them all from a single interface. Once you’ve learned one tool (KACE) for UEM, you’ve learned them all.
Training is included in the licensing price of KACE. You’ll have a knowledge base and plenty of web-driven training resources to get your UEM effort up and running in no time.
Myth 4 – Like Robin Hood, you’ll need to transfer a lot of wealth to pay for UEM tools.
Are you afraid that you’re going to have to take from the rich (your CFO) and give to some poor software or appliance vendor?
Most IT managers we talk to have been burned by high spend on enterprise mobility management solutions, so they are wary of UEM products that lead to out-of-control costs.
KACE comprises a single simplified system with a single associated license cost that covers everything you need in unified endpoint management:
- Hardware and software inventory management
- Software compliance and metering
- Software deployment, upgrades and removal
- Patch management
- Remote control
- Reporting
The variety of features eliminates the need to spend money on licensing, training and maintenance for multiple one-off products.
Myth 5 – Like Heracles, I’ll have to bust my hump for 10 years before UEM does me any good.
That poor guy. Heracles spent a long decade doing 12 flavors of the king’s dirty work, including killing the Hydra, nabbing the golden hide of Artemis, stealing that bull on Crete, grabbing the Mares of Diomedes, and, worst of all, cleaning the Augean stables (yecch!) in a single day.
If UEM were like that, I’d certainly run the other way.
But you’re lucky: You don’t need to spend months setting up an environment. It doesn’t take an insanely long time and a huge list of duties to get KACE up and running and to start seeing results. Most customers are running KACE within a few weeks of installation, and many of them begin to see ROI in less than six months.
KACE doesn’t require extensive professional services or specialized hardware. You can run KACE from ESX or Hyper-V, or from the cloud (SaaS). It’s appliance-based, so you can drop it in, give it an IP address and push it out to an agent.
Time to stop mything out
KACE is designed to make it easier for you to manage hundreds or thousands of devices, regardless of where your co-workers take them or which OS they’re running.
See how UEM can help you do more with less and boost your BYOD effort. Read the Redmond Magazine white paper Ensuring Rock-Solid Unified Endpoint Management by Nathan O’Bryan to learn how UEM plays into cloud services, Office 365 and Windows 10 migrations. Then get started on your own 30-day free trial of KACE Systems Management Appliance.
