Centralized Device Management Is A Reality
How can centralized device management help drive business efficiencies?
by Peter Printer
Effective device management is a continual challenge and balancing act for IT Depts. as technology evolves and more mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, handheld computers and printers) are added to organization’s infrastructures. It is crucial for an IT Dept. to have a carefully developed and well-defined device management strategy in place at the beginning of their deployment process.
The plan must provide a centralized device management platform so device configurations are consistent, optimized, continuously connected, highly secure and scalable. Doing so will not only allow the organization to run smoother, save money and take advantage of enhanced technology and future advancement and opportunities.
Without a solid plan, the organization will suffer with:
- Poor efficiencies
- Non-uniform upgrades and missing patches
- Security issues
- Higher costs
- Lost opportunities
Three Key Tasks for Device Management:
- Updating device operating system
- such as firmware upgrades, OS patches and updates
- Device configuration
- each new device hardware must be initially provisioned and set up to organization’s standards
- ongoing and continual process to maintain proper configurations throughout usage lifecycle
- Status reporting
- provides error and exception reports
- provides centralized visibility into devices to ensure uptime and availability
A Successful Device Management Plan should include:
- Support both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ operations
- ‘Push’ – when the device management application has the ability to discover devices on a network
- provides strong IT control over devices, content and timeframes
- ‘Pull’ – when the devices manage themselves and contain settings directing them when and where they retrieve configurations, updates, etc.
- Both certificate and encryption technology that can be applied or withdrawn by IT Depts.
- Centralization
- ensures device pool is synchronized, updated and easily monitored
- ability to collect device uptime stats and analyze data to detect problem areas – for proactive issue resolution
For further information on effectively managing your fleet of mobile devices and barcode scanning solutions, call us as (800) 643-2664 and immediately talk to one of our friendly representatives; or chat us up on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn!
