The Razor’s Edge

The group walks us down the path to simplify IT by dealing with groups of people who have similar requirements but may not necessarily do the same job. Often, this is called the development of “personas.” Jeff Malec points out that we now have five distinct generations in the workforce. They are different and have their own attitudes. Bruce Michelson, who has done considerable work around demographics and how it's impacting organizations, then dives into the concept of "Planet Me," a planet that is shifting.

The group tackles the concept of Bring Your Own Device, which has been defined as “an approach to end-user computing that involves the support—and encouragement—of an organization’s end users accessing key managed IT resources on their own personal devices.” Cody Gerhardt speaks for many in the group when he observes, "I go back to a very simple statement we often make: Every IT decision is a security decision. So when you look at a device that’s BYOD, and it likely doesn't have some of the security rigor that a commercial device has, there’s a higher chance of that system being attacked and data being lost. And if you can’t protect it, control it, manage it, and update it, it's not a wise decision.”

The group discusses the widespread trend of employees changing work, shifting works, and leaving jobs early primarily during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as Bruce Michelson observes, "it’s important to understand that the seeds for this transition were planted far in advance of the pandemic, and many folks believe that basically the pandemic accelerated this particular trend in the marketplace. It’s also important to note that historians are going to be discussing this for years after the pandemic is over. It accentuated what used to be called the work/life balance.”

The group addresses the challenges of managing a corporate environment with the shift to modern management. Some companies have already started down this path, but others have yet to begin the journey. The old way of managing endpoints dealt with creating a large monolithic image, integrating hardware drivers, and deploying it across the network using OSD or some other imaging tool. This was a cumbersome process and required IT to do quite a bit of heavy lifting, which meant they weren’t using their skills to advance the business, but only to maintain it day to day. The new management methodology should allow users to do their own deployment, allowing IT to “stay in the shadows” and just set everything up. Evolving from that legacy method to a “cloud first” environment does require some planning, however. Jeff Malec then explained how modern management lets you take advantage of cloud-based tools, whether from Microsoft or VMware, to automate and scale much of the process that used to be pretty redundant. The group then moved on to discuss modern management in the Windows world and how a modern management philosophy applies to the mobile experience as well. The reality is that it is very much like the consumer experience of buying a new phone, Jeff said: Everything is pre-provisioned, and you sign in with your credentials and join the network. That’s a lot like what Microsoft Autopilot and Intune do. “It’s really just an automation of provisioning and then automatically joining the domain, and it's all set up through a cloud infrastructure that’s meant to drive out cost and drive out time in the setup portion of the lifecycle management for the device,” said Jeff. After discussing modern management for physical systems, the group moved on to address virtualization, with Cody Gerhardt describing how it’s evolving and modern management’s impact there. He also highlighted key features found in the VMware Workspace ONE unified endpoint management tool (formerly AirWatch), and suggested that users ask themselves what tools they need today and tomorrow.