How Confident Are You That Your Devices Can Support Work from Anywhere?

“Work from Anywhere” is no longer an aspiration but an increasingly everyday business reality for organisations of every size. New research shows that remote/hybrid working and learning are trends set to stay, with one study finding 51% of employees reporting flexible working arrangements in their existing role, and 37% of organisations seeing an increase in requests in the last six months alone (CIPD 2022).

To harness the potential of this new reality necessitates a shift in cultural norms and mindsets, coupled with the optimisation of technology to enable critical outcomes across collaboration, productivity, work-life balance, retention/recruitment, as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion. Expectations around technology “wants and needs” have accelerated too, to the extent that some 49% of employees report being frustrated by the technology provided by their employer, and 26% considering leaving their job because of it (Ivanti 2022). At the same time, IT teams are navigating increased workloads and complexity, along with issues of “tool sprawl” (JumpCloud 2022).  

Four key priorities have emerged to optimise Work from Anywhere for IT users and IT professionals: performance, stability, security, and (remote) manageability.

It remains an absolute truism: Performance matters! And this goes beyond your CPU; it’s about platform performance, which can be enhanced by bringing together PCIe 5, support for DDR5, and WiFi 6e, optimised for speed. And the software you use will make use of that endpoint performance, too.

Stability is also critical, and not just for a singular device but for your entire IT estate, from builds to the OS, apps, and firmware. Updating on a regular cadence is key, ideally monthly/quarterly, with drivers for graphics, USB, and WiFi especially impactful. (Get this wrong and you’ll experience performance issues, from video calls hanging to issues in your Excel worksheet.) By minimising the volume and variants of drivers you need to support through standardisation/consistency, you can reduce the amount of engineering work required—and consequently reduce risk, too. (More on better managing PC refresh predictability is available here.)

And with the rise of the data-driven organisation, issues of privacy, permissions, and personalisation have moved to centre stage, with security risks escalating in speed, scope, sophistication, and scale. These need to be tackled at three layers: below the OS (typically the hardest area to attack, but equally hardest to detect when a breach occurs), within the OS, and via proactive threat detection technologies that don’t impact performance. This is especially critical given the expanded inventory of assets that IT teams need to manage.

Finally, remote manageability is essential, especially with the rise in use of both company-owned and Bring Your Own Devices. 360-degree visibility and seamless integration are key, right across the spectrum of processes including equipping, validating, configuring, monitoring, and analysis.

With its emphasis on the four pillars of performance, stability, security, and manageability, Intel vPro is an excellent exemplar of holistic support for business in action. Intel® Hardware Shield provides comprehensive multilayer security protection “out of the box”; by activating Intel® Active Management Technology, IT can remotely manage and repair PCs (with Intel® Endpoint Management Assistant enabling cloud manageability and off-premises support), whilst full platform validation ensures PC fleet stability. Combined, this enables secure support for today’s highly dispersed workforce with significant ROI cost savings (Forrester 2022).

Intel vPro is fully tailorable to different device and user types, which is vital when we consider the evolution of devices. Whilst laptops have a one-to-one management model and high visibility around issues with a person “behind the device,” the desktop has a changing infrastructure role to play but is less visible, increasingly built into other things, from collaboration rooms to Point of Sale, ATMs, and digital signage. So, in combination, Intel vPro helps deliver what IT needs and IT users want.

Learn more here.