Harness the power of data to minimise IT disruptions

The drive towards hybrid working practices has opened up new opportunities for business efficiencies, and for employees to improve their work/life balance. Yet it has also introduced new challenges for IT. When every home becomes an extension of the office, how do you protect and secure corporate data and the network? And how do you manage and maintain a fleet of devices without physical access, and ensure they stay compliant and up-to-date? All without impeding employee productivity, in an IT environment where tools designed for on-premise systems no longer fit the bill?

The answer lies in a shift towards managed services and cloud-based solutions, harnessing the power of data, analytics, machine learning and automation to deliver a new model of ‘invisible IT’. Taking this approach will strengthen security, minimise business disruption and deliver an employee experience that’s consistently great.

With HP Adaptive Endpoint Management, businesses can offload most of the burden of management to service experts at HP. All updates, including Windows, security, BIOS and firmware, are delivered seamlessly from the cloud. End users aren’t disturbed with shutdown requests in the middle of the day – everything just works. IT teams, meanwhile, can rest easy knowing that devices in the fleet are getting patched, and security policies enforced.

This, says HP Senior Product Manager, Trevor Gordon, is key to empowering employees to be at their most productive. Employees understand that updates and patches are a necessary evil – they just don’t want them getting in their way. “We’re always very focused on trying to eliminate needs for reboots and having to do all these things that are a pain to go through,” he says. “You get a patch, you get an update, it happens.”

IT driven by proactive insight

Crucially, this new model of IT is proactive, driven by telemetry data from the whole fleet of devices, fed through HP’s TechPulse platform and Proactive Insights service. TechPulse aggregates critical data from all endpoint devices and applications, then delivers it through a cloud-based dashboard in one single view. This enables IT teams to monitor and manage the health and performance of individual devices, down to component level. But it also gives them the ability to spot and resolve issues while they’re still emerging. If there’s a security issue, a BIOS vulnerability, a cyber-attack or a problem with a key business application, you can identify systems at risk and remediate before they can result in downtime.

“The end user may have problems fixed and they don’t even know it’s broke, because it didn’t,” says Gordon. “We caught it, and it was dealt with proactively, remediated in the background. That’s what end-users really want.”

HP Endpoint Management and Proactive Insights tie in with HP’s Device-as-a-Service offerings to maintain this employee experience throughout the device’s lifecycle, making the most of the specific management and security features built into HP PCs. What’s more, working with DaaS ensures that even a serious device failure needn’t hamper productivity; a replacement device can be anywhere within 24 hours, and ready for use within an hour. However, HP’s services aren’t dependent on HP hardware; they’re designed to work across a diverse, multi-manufacturer fleet.

This approach works. When the German Agricultural Society, DLG, started using HP Proactive Insights, it recorded a 15% reduction in device failures and a 10% reduction in IT workloads within the first year, while delivering insights on how devices were being used and whether anything was holding employees back.

It’s this granular, constant feedback that enables businesses using Proactive Insights to keep improving and optimising how employees work. This, Gordon argues, is a theme that resonates with every business. “I would put experience and productivity together,” he says. “The reality is, if you have a great experience, most likely you’re going to be highly productive. I like to say that they drive each other.”

To find out more about HP’s services and how they could help minimise disruption in your business, visit HP Services – PC Services for Commercial Enterprise and SMB IT | HP® United Kingdom.

HP has several exciting events coming up this year – click on each to learn more. 

1. The Official CIO Summit UK presents the best opportunity to hear how your peers are tackling the biggest challenges in the UK IT industry. (This event takes place in September).
2. The CSO Security Summit, scheduled for November, is the best place to hear what novel approaches and innovative technologies your security peers are taking to enhance and futureproof their security strategies.