How endpoint visibility trims IT costs and boosts performance
Enhance IT efficiency through endpoint visibility - cutting wasteful spend while in turn boosting productivity.
Published on 8th September 2023
Post-COVID, the hybrid work model has proven that it is here to stay. Many organizations have invested in digital workplace tools, such as cloud-based productivity apps and digital collaboration tools, to accommodate a radically evolving work environment. These tools ensure workers stay connected with colleagues, increase efficiency, and work seamlessly on-site and off-premises.
In this new normal, CIOs have been challenged to enhance the employee experience (EX) while keeping expenditures in check. This is particularly important in the current economic climate. The good news is that many areas have room to slash costs without impacting performance – CIOs just have to identify and eliminate wasteful spend.
Poor Visibility Obscures Needless Spending
There are many causes of wasteful IT spend, especially for larger corporations with massive IT budgets. Ultimately, though, four key factors generally drive excessive IT costs today:
- Outdated hardware: When devices become slow, they can hinder employee productivity. However, organizations are often unsure whether to upgrade their existing devices or perform a company-wide hardware refresh, as they need insight into device performance. Replacing devices prematurely, especially when tight budgets, can result in unnecessary IT expenses, mainly if the organization is dealing with more pressing employee experience issues.
- Inefficient license management: With the rise of hybrid work, companies are increasingly subscribing to more applications, leading to significant wasted spend due to poor license management. A recent studyOpens a new window shows that unused software licenses cost companies $537 million yearly. This is often caused by a need for more visibility into subscriptions or maintaining active subscriptions to prevent data loss.
- Need for issue resolution: IT teams who rely on manual processes without AI or automation cannot handle their workload effectively and need additional support personnel to maintain current service levels. In addition, using unproductive tools wastes engineers’ time and increases IT support costs.
- Shadow IT costs: Shadow IT refers to unauthorized applications, software, devices, and other IT assets not approved by the IT department. Since Shadow IT cannot be monitored and often goes undetected, its costs cannot be controlled.
Endpoint Visibility Unveils Hidden, Wasteful IT Expenditures
Better visibility is central to identifying and eliminating wasteful IT spend. There are many unified endpoint management (UEM) platforms for this purpose. IT employs UEM solutions to manage and monitor all the company’s end-user devices from a centralized location. Since employees have gone fully or partially remote during the COVID-19 pandemic, IT administrators have continued to rely on their existing UEM platforms to provision employee devices remotely.
However, these technologies weren’t designed for today’s hybrid work world, leading to inevitable problems. In short, these technologies do not offer the necessary visibility to uncover hidden endpoints and IT assets, such as desktop computers and mobile devices (bountiful in employees’ homes). This lack of visibility into endpoints increases resolution time per ticket, thus increasing the cost per ticket. This has all sorts of cascading effects: Hardware refresh costs go up since the planned refresh of hardware under warranty is not visible. The cost incurred for licensed software becomes higher compared to the actual usage of the software.
In the current environment, merely tracking metrics and static details is insufficient. IT teams require more endpoint insight to map out these complex, highly distributed hybrid settings accurately. That means they need tools to connect metrics and the employee experience. The answer is solutions that provide automatic endpoint mapping capabilities and deliver contextual details to IT teams.
Better Visibility With Automatic Endpoint Mapping
End-user experience monitoring (EUEM) software employs AI to automatically map every enterprise endpoint, reducing the complexity and burden of manual processes. These tools use a lightweight agent deployed on all end-user devices to gather telemetry data, presented on a user-friendly dashboard for analysis. With these insights, IT teams can monitor every IT software and hardware asset across the enterprise while swiftly identifying flaws and abnormalities to prioritize upgrade initiatives. Auto-remediation at the endpoint can further streamline the user experience by preventing IT issues from disrupting their workday without involving help or service desk personnel.
Endpoint visibility through EUEM software can provide IT teams with insights that can help them make informed investments and reduce operational expenses. One key benefit of endpoint visibility is the ability to optimize hardware lifecycles. For instance, if an IT administrator cannot determine the root cause of low device performance or repeated application crashes, they may decide to upgrade or replace the device prematurely. With endpoint visibility, IT teams can determine whether a replacement or upgrade is necessary.
Additionally, endpoint visibility allows IT teams to track all enterprise licenses and identify which ones have been unused for an extended period. They can then create alerts to deactivate those licenses, resulting in cost savings that can be used to enhance the hybrid work model. Auto-remediation at the endpoint, without requiring software development personnel to be involved, can also streamline the user experience by preventing IT issues from disrupting the workday.
EUEM’s advanced visibility can benefit enterprises of all types. For instance, imagine a bank manager having trouble accessing a database hosted offsite. EUEM technology can quickly pinpoint exactly where the issue lies – the employee’s device, the WiFi router or the database software itself. The rapid resolution of the problem minimizes the disruption, allowing the worker to focus on delivering value rather than troubleshooting.
Here’s another example: Consider industries with highly seasonal flows of users to onboard and offboard, such as universities, hospitality, and retail. Even simple actions such as new user account creation, allocating laptops, issuing badges, and managing permissions can become massive time-eaters when multiplied by hundreds or thousands. However, accurate endpoint visibility and smart automation can simplify joining and leaving processes while improving efficiency and reducing manual overhead.
Cutting IT Costs Without Harming Productivity
With the economy stuck in a temporary rough patch, enterprises are mandating that CIOs freeze or curtail their department’s spending. IT operations are very different in today’s hybrid work world compared to the traditional workplace of yesteryear. That means the tools and strategies for reducing IT spend are also different. By utilizing intelligent EUEM software to achieve end-to-end visibility into each endpoint, organizations can shrink IT expenses without eliminating the services and systems employees need to do their jobs effectively and productively.
