By Daniel Okine, Senior Director of Product Management, Adaptiva
Enterprises worldwide are dealing with the pain, complexity, and costs associated with migrating systems over to Windows 10, and the pace of adoption is accelerating.
In April, Gartner predicted that 85% of enterprises would start Windows 10 deployments by the end of the year. In May, Microsoft disclosed that it had reached the half a million-download mark. Then in June, Adaptiva released its 2017 Windows 10 Enterprise Impact Survey, showing that nearly 53 percent of respondents had already migrated more than 10% of their systems to Windows 10, and 28% were more than halfway through their migrations. That number is expected to climb to 52% by this time next year.
Companies are clearly pressing onward, dealing with the hassle and the cost, because of Windows 10’s enhanced security benefits. Yet, migration is only the first part of the battle. These prized, additional security features don’t magically work as soon as Windows 10 is deployed; companies are not done the minute it’s loaded onto a machine. They only reap the benefits of Windows 10 if their endpoints are configured correctly and actively maintained.
This could constitute a problem for a lot of organizations. According to our recent survey, 45% of respondents indicated that they lack the time to automate the endpoint security management process themselves, and nearly a third felt staff lacked the necessary skills to write their own automation tools. This potentially translates to a lot of outdated and unprotected systems, even after migration takes place.
The Remedy
As companies look at their investment in Windows 10, they are forced to consider three options:
· They can add highly trained IT team members devoted solely to Windows 10 migration and its subsequent required updates;
· They can risk configuring and maintaining endpoints with existing staff and resources;
· Or they select an intelligent, self-managing automated solution that can drive endpoint compliance and configurations at scale from a trusted partner.
Common sense says automation is the most effective way to go to truly get the most out of Windows 10, particularly now that automated solutions can solve even the biggest headaches presented in the most demanding environments.
What should enterprise IT departments look for when selecting an automation partner? First and foremost, a flexible solution that enables enterprises to quickly and easily create their own health policies and remediation as well as integrate with existing business processes without writing a single line of code. This reduces the barrier to entry in addition to the resource drain required for current teams to keep all endpoints updated — no matter how often security policies change.
Once that hurdle is crossed, the solution needs to be able to automate a variety of endpoint security functions. For example, can it check to ensure that features like Device Guard, Credential Guard, and Secure Boot are enabled and active on every endpoint? Will the solution be able to determine if every endpoint has the software requirements and hardware specifications required to support the new Windows 10 features?
Once Windows 10 is deployed, can the solution keep up with all of the updates and track that the right version of Windows 10 is running on each endpoint? Today’s automated endpoint security management solutions should be able to accomplish these tasks and more.
By selecting a quality automated endpoint security configuration management solution, enterprises can dramatically increase their efficiency to ensure that no endpoint falls behind or is left vulnerable to attack.
IT teams are freed of extra burdens, and systems are shorn up so that companies can ensure that the move to Windows 10 is worth it. It’s a very simple proposition and one that companies today cannot afford to pass over.
As first published in Infosecurity Magazine.
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Daniel Okine, senior director of product management, is responsible for setting product vision and roadmap at Adaptiva, using data from market trends and opportunities, competitive landscape, and customer needs to develop a global strategy for the company’s endpoint management platform and products. Daniel drives the technical priorities and programs at Adaptiva in collaboration with key stakeholders in engineering and marketing. For more information on Adaptiva, the market leader in modern endpoint management and security, please visit www.adaptiva.com, and follow the company at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
