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Updated on June 25, 2024
It’s a big question. Taking into account the many different ways organizations support their employees, it’s no wonder we have to ask it. Do employees work solely in the same (physical) office? Are they using a specific operating system or one of their choosing? Are they allowed to use their personal devices to access work resources? And if so, which devices can do so, and what kinds of resources can they access? A hybrid workplace environment poses serious challenges to security, usability, and compliance, and leaving employees’ devices unmanaged leads to vulnerabilities, user experience friction, and reduced productivity.
Remote device management is what organizations use to secure employee endpoints and manage them effectively. This article describes the practice in detail, explaining what it is, why it’s so important, and how to find the right platform for your needs.
What Is Remote Device Management?
Remote device management gives organizations the ability to secure, control, and manage employee smartphones, tablets, and PCs. With these endpoint devices managed through a centralized platform, the company ensures a secure, consistent user experience for employees regardless of their location.
Remote device management works by deploying lightweight endpoint agents on employee devices that access the network. These agents transmit data securely to and from a mobile device management (MDM) platform, enabling the organization to enforce policies across the entire device fleet.
Why Is Remote Device Management Important?
Remote device management simplifies the process of securing complex fleets of mobile endpoints. This enables the organization to adopt fully remote workplace policies, while granting the visibility it needs to enforce those policies securely.
Here are some of the benefits organizations that deploy remote device management enjoy:
1. Consistency
Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) environments contain a diverse collection of hardware and software. Neglecting to establish or enforce standard usage for these network assets can leave data and devices vulnerable to cyberattack. Modern MDM solutions allow IT admins to enforce standards to keep device functionality and security consistent across a wide range of devices and use cases.
2. Insights and Reporting
The number of devices accessing company networks is growing, and often remains unsupervised. Companies need a method for viewing and monitoring those devices.
MDM solutions provide a level of visibility into devices accessing corporate data. High quality MDM solutions provide deep, comprehensive observability according to preconfigured needs.
For example, MDM solutions can give a bird’s-eye view of several status and activity data points for all endpoints or subsets. With JumpCloud’s MDM you can see which devices don’t have multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled, who’s locked out of their device, and the battery life of every device on the network. You can also export these data points into compliance reports that help the organization meet regulatory needs.
3. Updates and Patch Management
Keeping all systems and applications updated is critical to compliance and security. Unpatched software is a major cause of security breaches and compromised data.
Some remote device management solutions enable companies to track this by offering visibility into devices’ OS versions, applications, and software, triggering alerts when they are due for updates or patches. This helps the organization ensure all employees are working with up-to-date tools, regardless of whether they’re using personal or corporate-issued devices.
4. Security
The lack of device unification and supervision in remote and BYOD environments can create significant security vulnerabilities. Companies need the ability to manage and secure both devices and their contents.
Many remote device management solutions offer additional layers of security that help remote and BYOD companies secure their device fleets. Some common examples of security features some MDM solutions offer include:
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA): MFA can provide security at the device and app levels. Many solutions integrate with MFA tools or offer MFA as a native feature. JumpCloud offers MFA via TOTP or push notification natively, while delivering insights and control into MFA activity and configurations.
- Disk encryption: Some remote device management solutions allow admins to enable full disk encryption on devices remotely. When combined with policy creation, this can be turned on as a rule for all fleet devices.
Tip: When exploring tools that offer disk encryption, look for ones that store the recovery key automatically to avoid accidental lockout.
- Remote lock and wipe: If a device is lost or stolen, many MDM tools allow you to lock the device and wipe its contents to prevent data compromise.
Integrating device data with identity data can dramatically enhance security, as well. This allows admins to view data holistically and use context to identify suspicious activity in real time. Technically, this combination of device and identity security is referred to as Unified Endpoint Management (UEM), which is a distinct technology.
5. Onboarding and Offboarding
Onboarding employees remotely can require multiple tedious, time-consuming steps for IT admins. Without remote onboarding tools, they need to order new devices from a distributor, configure each device manually, and then ship devices to new hires.
When employees leave the company, the same process happens in reverse. If the employee is terminated unwillingly, their cooperation is not guaranteed.
Remote device management can greatly reduce the number of physical touch points IT needs during these processes. JumpCloud offers zero-touch provisioning, which allows IT to set up new employees’ computers entirely remotely.
This enables you to skip the shipment chain and drop-ship devices directly to new employees. IT can configure the device in the background without needing to handle the device physically.
Comprehensive MDM solutions with a UEM component also significantly streamline offboarding. When users are assigned to devices, they can easily be deprovisioned and wiped — often remotely — the day an employee leaves the company.
6. Multi-OS Support
BYOD and remote work have driven more companies to support multiple operating systems in their environment. Now they need solutions that can support a multi-OS IT environment.
Not all MDM solutions support multiple operating systems — in fact, most favor certain platforms. For example:
- Windows Endpoint Manager supports devices with Windows operating systems, with Mac support added as well, but it does not support Linux.
- Jamf MDM is a common choice for Mac and iOS devices, but doesn’t support Windows or Linux.
This leaves many admins stacking multiple MDMs to gain full coverage, like Jamf vs. Intune for Apple and Windows environments.
Make sure the MDM solution you choose fully supports the OS your organization uses. If you use more than one OS, look for an OS-agnostic solution like JumpCloud, which supports Mac, Windows, and Linux devices. Because BYOD policies and a rising prioritization of the employee experience are pushing more companies toward multi-OS models, OS-agnostic solutions can help with future scaling.
Benefits of Remote Device Management
Remote device management provides organizations with valuable benefits, including:
- Improved productivity and efficiency. Managing remote devices manually is time-consuming and prone to error. Centralized, automation solutions give administrators more time to focus on higher-impact strategic initiatives.
- Enhanced security and data protection. Maintaining a secure endpoint fleet is challenging for security teams that are already stretched thin. Remote device management helps those teams focus on core security capabilities.
- Simplified device provisioning and configuration. Faster and more efficient device provisioning reduces the cost and complexity of onboarding new employees. Fewer IT support tickets streamline the onboarding process overall.
- Centralized monitoring and troubleshooting. When serious issues do arise, managing the entire device fleet from a single pane of glass makes them easier to resolve.
Challenges of Remote Device Management
Many enterprise IT leaders and managed service providers (MSPs) recognize the value of remote device management, but face steep challenges implementing a full-scale solution. Some of the issues organizations often face include:
- Ensuring secure remote access. Remote device management gives security leaders the tools they need to ensure secure remote access, but still requires proper configuration and deployment.
- Managing a diverse range of devices and operating systems. Not all mobile device management solutions support every device type and operating system. Incomplete deployments can introduce security risks, especially when dealing with stolen or lost devices.
- Dealing with connectivity issues and network limitations. Inconsistent connections can impact the effectiveness of remote device management processes, causing disruptions and delays.
Best Practices for Remote Device Management
To get the most value out of your remote device management solution, develop an implementation strategy that takes the following into account:
- Strong security configurations. Your mobile device policies should reflect a consistent and secure user experience, wherever users are when they interact with network assets.
- Regularly updating and patching devices. Use your remote device management platforms to automate the patching and updating process for every device in your fleet.
- Use dedicated remote monitoring and management tools. Full-featured mobile device management solutions come with a wealth of cloud-native tools for improving the usability and security of endpoint devices. Take advantage of these features to streamline the entire process.
- Establishing clear device usage policies. Every device in your network should correlate to a specific user role. Developing a role-based security framework provides an optimal foundation for building secure usage policies.
Choosing the Right Remote Device Management Solution
Device Management Point Solutions
The pandemic increased global demand for remote device management, leading many companies to use more than one MDM solution to meet their needs. The point-solution approach often leads to the organization implementing multiple remote device management solutions at once.
This approach has two weak spots:
- It requires companies to spend money on multiple solutions rather than one.
- It often creates residual problems with APIs, integrations, and communication between tools.
In some cases, the point-solution model can lead to siloed data and a system without one source of truth. This puts data integrity at risk and may compromise the integrated intelligence you should receive when viewing and interpreting remote device data as a whole.
Non-centralized data access often means managing different sets of data in separate management consoles. This drastically increases friction for the IT user. Pay special attention to this fact when reviewing customer reviews and testimonials for remote device management solutions.
The increased cost of purchasing more than one software license is another issue. It puts increasing pressure on the organization as it grows, by essentially doubling — or tripling — the cost of scaling mobile device management needs.
Finally, the integrations and APIs required to facilitate communication between these tools add complexity and opportunities for breakdown. Flexibility and easy integration are vital for sustainable mobile device management success.
By contrast, centralized access management provides a solid foundation for unified data and access management. Having a comprehensive understanding of device usage helps you track device and user activity more effectively.
With this information, you can extrapolate to identify areas where you could reallocate resources, reduce bottlenecks, optimize license distribution, and more. Having it all in one console not only streamlines the IT admin experience, but it also reduces the risk of problems with integrating different tools and provides more complete security insights, leading to better incident detection and response.
JumpCloud for Remote Device Management
JumpCloud provides a comprehensive, cloud-native solution for managing remote devices and enabling best-in-class security for endpoint fleets. You can use JumpCloud to provision and deprovision employee devices, manage patches and updates, and enforce security policies across entire device groups.
Find out how JumpCloud’s cloud-based directory platform can unify identities, devices, networks, and resources in one browser-based console. Implement centralized MDM and enhance it with intelligent UEM capabilities informed by the Zero Trust framework. Sign up for a demo to learn more about how JumpCloud can help you.
