Codifying endpoint management

Sudeep Charles at Progress explains how codifying endpoint management can boost innovation, security and user experience

The dramatic shift to remote and hybrid work styles has challenged IT teams to handle this change without putting customer and employee experiences at risk or disrupting business continuity.

However, one of the biggest challenges is the endpoint management of their expanding ecosystems.

System Administrators (SAs) are struggling under the pressure of hundreds of repetitive daily tasks to protect what’s theirs. As a result, tech team leaders are increasingly adopting automation strategies for specific endpoint-management workflows.

For instance, this could be remote desktop onboarding for new hires or monitoring the state of an endpoint, like a laptop, to check for deviations from compliance profiles.

In looking for efficient ways to automate these tasks, IT teams turn to writing scripts.. Scripting addresses many of the time-consuming fleet-management tasks. This could be managing nodes, such as laptops, that need customisations or aren’t readily available from a mobile device management (MDM) tool. It can also help with automating endpoint-management workflows.

Drawbacks of scripting

However, where scripting doesn’t meet the mark is when tasks increase in complexity and require more detailed configuration, resulting in them becoming complex and behaving inconsistently. This results in SAs spending time fixing errors and causing the technology team’s workload to become unsustainable.

Most scripts are written by individual SAs and are not audited for compliance. Once the process is automated, it becomes tribal knowledge and is seldom scaled organisation-wide. These scripts are rarely audited, leaving potential compliance loopholes open.

Scripts repeatedly run when the same task is performed across multiple platforms. Done well, they take time to develop properly because IT teams must thoroughly test them before deployment.

Scripting can also contribute to a "hero culture", where a powerful few in the organisation take responsibility for most of the work. “Hero culture” can create knowledge silos and poor collaboration can be a risk to operational success.

When a flawed automation script causes a failure, it is difficult to tell if it is due to errors in the script or  elsewhere in the process. This puts the release cycle on pause. Because the problems in automation are usually unknown at the time of implementation, it can be challenging to quickly update an automation script after it has been incorporated into the software lifecycle.

Putting data at risk

Scripting can  pose a critical data risk, resulting in costly errors for teams to fix. It is more informal than structured coding projects, which include check-in/check-out, revisions and rollback, testing and deployment.

If the automated script doesn’t know where to put vital data, it may ignore it or even destroy it. It might, at times, not even be compatible with new builds.

It’s one thing to use scripting as an automation agent to only deliver code and quite another to use it for automating tasks. In this case, consistency and visibility become the biggest challenges. When you run a script, the outcome is not always the same and scripts do not account for configuration drifts. Scripts are also not version-controlled, therefore debugging is difficult.

And most importantly, continuous compliance can’t be delivered, which is essential for a modern business.

The benefits of codifying endpoint management

Codifying the IT resource fleet is a strategic approach that automates the configuration of diverse, complex systems while defining security and compliance standards as human-readable code. This eliminates the risks of scripting and allows quick application distribution  across various environments. When new infrastructure is coded, there is consistency in each set of instructions, which increases standardisation.

The key benefits of codifying IT teams’ infrastructure include:

Improved Dev-IT collaboration. Whilst development and IT operations must collaborate for effective performance, the goals of each team are different, and they may be using different tools. Endpoint coding encourages collaboration between teams, enabling them to share responsibilities while upgrading resources or even introducing new product form factors.

Faster configurations. With centralised infrastructure automation policies governing how devices are configured and which software runs on them, this speeds up endpoint configuration. System baselines are established, allowing targets to be configured at a user or system level.

Faster app lifecycles. Coded IT fleets offer faster app lifecycle management as the need for speed is a priority. With visibility into every endpoint device in the IT infrastructure, teams have real-time control. Automation is the catalyst for increased efficiency with policies and patches applied as needed.

Increased user satisfaction. Codifying the fleet also means considering user satisfaction. Users are most likely to detect scripting issues before IT teams. Providing a one-of-a-kind, component-based service in a short amount of time can boost user happiness and improve the reputations of IT teams within organisations.

Less shadow IT. When codifying the fleet through assisted deployment, IT maximises endpoint security while managing compliance effectively. This aids in budgeting and pricing allocation. In conjunction with this heightened user satisfaction, the organisation will have fewer shadow IT deployments, ensuring quicker reactions to new IT requirements.

 Reduced time and costs. Codifying your fleet decreases operational expenditures. An enterprise can configure and deploy a fully tested and compliant new IT infrastructure asset in just a few minutes, with little or no human intervention. This significantly reduces time spent on support and maintenance.

Building a more secure and innovative business

A business that codifies endpoint management can innovate and move more quickly, maintain security and compliance at scale and effectively deliver applications to their systems whilst increasing user satisfaction.

By automating repetitive tasks, developers can gain continuous visibility into the configuration and compliance state of IT resources across the enterprise. They have more time to focus on meaningful creative tasks, resulting in increased productivity and motivation in their roles.

Sudeep Charles is Director, Product Marketing at Progress

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com