Is Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) Enough? Definition and Future Innovations

Unified endpoint management (UEM) is a comprehensive approach to managing endpoint devices from a single console, including laptops, desktops, smartphones, and tablets. By integrating management processes and tools into a central solution, UEM helps organizations improve their ability to control, update, and protect devices while reducing costs by consolidating the tools needed and streamlining workflows by providing comprehensive visibility and control over devices no matter where they’re located.

The popularity of UEM reflects the increasing demands of today’s workplaces, where managing diverse devices within a single platform has become essential as organizations adapt to the complexities, scope, and speed of digital environments.

This is especially true for IT departments managing macro-trends like Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, hybrid workspaces, and cloud-enabled infrastructures.

This post will give you a deeper understanding of the current state of UEM, including its history, the differences between UEM and other solutions, key features, and what’s next in the evolution of endpoint management and security to help organizations effectively address the needs of today’s environments, threats, and business challenges.

• What is UEM?
• What are the differences between MDM, EMM, and UEM?
• What are the key features of a UEM solution?
• Does UEM enhance enterprise security?
• Is Tanium a unified endpoint management solution?
• The future of UEM: Next-generation unified endpoint management

What is UEM?

UEM was the first endpoint management solution of its kind to provide a unified platform where organizations could oversee a diverse array of endpoint devices in one view, including monitoring endpoints across different locations and operating systems connecting to your network — from company-issued laptops running Windows or macOS, remote employees checking their email on Android and Apple smartphones, to servers housing important corporate data running Linux.

UEM software emerged in response to an increasingly expansive mobile and on-premises device landscape. Before UEM, organizations had to rely on multiple endpoint management tools to gain visibility across different device types, and even then, how comprehensive these views were was questionable.

Not only did this patchwork of solutions leave IT and security teams with incomplete data, but it also left them with limited control over these endpoints and further divided teams already working in organizational silos.

UEM was built to combine and improve the existing features of solutions like mobile device management (MDM) and enterprise mobility management (EMM). Through this unique ability to centralize and consolidate endpoint management processes and tools, UEM allows organizations to more easily maintain device health, enforce security policies, and ensure compliance across all devices.

In the next section, we will learn about these endpoint tools and why combining them with other essential capabilities to create a unified view revolutionized endpoint device management as we know it.

What are the differences between MDM, EMM, and UEM?

MDM and EMM are separate solutions designed to manage and secure mobile endpoint devices, but they differ in scope and capabilities:

• MDM focuses specifically on managing mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. MDM solutions provide tools for enrolling devices, configuring settings, deploying applications, and enforcing security policies to ensure mobile devices are secure and compliant with company standards.
  
  However, this device-level management falls short for organizations looking to manage the applications and data mobile devices access or more robust security features needed to protect against or respond to increasingly sophisticated threats.
• EMM is an evolution of MDM that includes additional capabilities for managing mobile applications, content, and security. By incorporating features such as mobile application management (MAM), mobile content management (MCM), and mobile threat detection (MTD), EMM solutions provide a more holistic approach to managing mobile devices and data security.
  
  While EMM solutions offer greater control over mobile devices and the data they access and provide more advanced security features than MDM, they focus primarily on managing mobile endpoints.
  
  UEM is the evolution of MDM and EMM, which originated to solve the growing need to manage a broader range of endpoint devices from a one platform. UEM achieves this by combining and extending MDM and EMM capabilities to include device types beyond mobile and centralizing monitoring and controlling the many different types of devices with their various operating systems regardless of their location — an ability never before achieved in a single solution.
  
  With a clear understanding of its significance for managing various devices, let’s explore the specific capabilities of UEM solutions. We’ll also introduce the limitations of traditional UEM and the need to prioritize better endpoint security using next-gen solutions.
   

  [Read also: 9 ways Tanium makes asset discovery and inventory faster, simpler, easier and… better]

  What are the key features of a UEM solution?

  Conventional UEM solutions offer a range of features and benefits primarily driven by the ability to transform how organizations manage their devices through a central platform, including:

  • Comprehensive performance monitoring: With UEM, organizations can ensure that all devices receive the same level of attention and necessary updates wherever they’re located. This capability is especially valuable for organizations with a distributed workforce or global operations.
  • Streamlining processes: By integrating various management tools and processes into a single platform, UEM reduces the complexity of managing multiple point solutions. IT teams no longer need to juggle disparate endpoint management systems, which helps organizations quickly identify and address vulnerabilities, apply patches, and deploy software updates crucial for maintaining a strong security posture.
  • Supporting basic security efforts: The centralized platform of UEM can enable organizations to ensure many crucial security measures, such as proper device configuration, deploying software updates, enforcing security policies, and ensuring adherence to compliance regulations. However, not every UEM solution may fully cover all aspects needed to support modern endpoint security.

  As you can see, the true value of UEM lies in its core ability to combine various endpoint management capabilities into a single, cohesive solution.

  While UEM has achieved a significant milestone by consolidating device management, in the next section, we’ll explore why traditional UEM solutions often lack advanced security capabilities and, as UEM did for MDM and EMM, what the evolution of endpoint management may look like.

  Does UEM enhance enterprise security?

  UEM tools revolutionized the ability of organizations to manage their diverse device ecosystems effectively by centralizing endpoint management tools and controls into a single solution, which can help improve the ability to streamline many security processes.

  However, it’s important to recognize the limitations of conventional UEM solutions in providing advanced endpoint security features simply because UEM was not designed to do so.

  For example, ensuring cloud infrastructure management is a relatively new challenge for modern organizations. UEM solutions that don’t meet these requirements can potentially create security vulnerabilities because of lapses in visibility and control.

  Additionally, while UEM provides a unified platform for managing endpoints, traditional UEM solutions may not offer automation and lack the speed and reliability to respond to emerging threats quickly or prevent attacks by addressing critical vulnerabilities.

  UEM will continue to evolve to meet the ever more complex demands of endpoint management.

  Like UEM solving for the gaps in endpoint visibility, several newer endpoint management tools — endpoint detection and response (EDR), extended detection and response (XDR), and the latest, converged endpoint management (XEM) — have entered the market, each evolving to provide more endpoint management and advanced security solutions to ensure comprehensive protection against evolving threats.

  For example, advanced endpoint management solutions such as XEM are built to use machine learning and AI insights to support real-time monitoring, behavior-based detection, and automated responses to predict and mitigate new threats, which transforms endpoint security from a reactive to a proactive approach.

  While there are many tools on the market for endpoint management and endpoint security — from those designed for specific use cases like detecting known malware on a single endpoint to systems built to detect and automatically remediate cybersecurity breaches — as technology and threats advance, endpoint management solutions must continue to adapt to new challenges and build from the revolutionary ability introduced by UEM that allows organizations to centrally manage their diverse device ecosystems effectively.

  Is Tanium a unified endpoint management solution?

  While UEM is the culmination of years of technological evolution in end-user device management, a new need has emerged in response to keeping increasingly complex digital environments secure and performing as expected.
  
  Tanium responded with Converged Endpoint Management (XEM), our next-generation platform that offers essential UEM capabilities in addition to crucial endpoint management and security features to address important use cases organizations are facing today while also ensuring seamless control across all devices to streamline operations further by providing:
  • Comprehensive visibility and control to reduce the attack surface and enable a more rapid response to and remediation of security threats and operational disruptions
  • A single platform for managing devices and apps simplifies admin tasks and reduces operational complexity and expense (i.e., licensing fees, unnecessary servers, etc.) while ensuring consistency across the organization, minimizing the risk of compliance breaches
  • Improves the digital employee experience (DEX) by automating self-service workflows, allowing employees to resolve issues quickly and efficiently, and gathering feedback to continuously improve the user experience by providing comprehensive endpoint monitoring and management to ensure a smooth and productive digital work environment
  • Automates patch management to ensure software has the latest security fixes, reducing the risk of breaches and improving system stability and performance by fixing bugs and functionality
  • Automating other key processes, such as remote software distribution and device configuration, to free teams for more strategic work
  • Supporting a Zero-Trust security model throughout the enterprise, ensuring global adherence to authentication protocols, internal and regulatory requirements, and compliance mandates to minimize non-compliance penalties
  • Integration with key partners to enhance capabilities for identity and access management (IAM) and client management tools, including Microsoft Intune for MDM and MAM, to ensure complete visibility across all endpoints and enable faster threat detection and remediation by providing real-time data and comprehensive views of the IT environment

  [Explore our partner integrations]

  The future of UEM: Next-generation unified endpoint management

  IT departments have always been expected to do more with less — including tracking, protecting, updating, and performing other critical endpoint lifecycle management workflows, such as onboarding, provisioning, de-provisioning, and patching — quickly across tens to hundreds of thousands of devices (and this amount keeps growing).
  
  While these expectations haven’t changed, what has changed in recent years is the increasingly dispersed workforce, growing army of AI-powered cyber attackers, and an explosion of managed and unmanaged endpoints and application services, all ready to disrupt and test the abilities of conventional endpoint management solutions like UEM.
  
  As the demand for better endpoint security and management grows, traditional UEM solutions must evolve again.
  
  Autonomous Endpoint Management (AEM) is the future of endpoint management. AEM infuses endpoint monitoring and protection solutions with advanced automation and AI insights to simplify device management and enhance security by reducing potential vulnerabilities, streamlining operations, and driving business value.

  Tanium is at the forefront of this transformation with our AEM framework, which will allow organizations to maintain continuous visibility and control over their endpoint environments. This framework enables organizations to set corporate policies, define governance rules and required authorizations, and make decisions based on their comfort level with autonomy.

  The convergence of endpoint management, security, and real-time insights is embodied in the Tanium XEM solution, which offers a comprehensive platform for managing and securing all endpoints. This integrated approach goes beyond traditional UEM, providing a proactive, intelligent, and automated solution that adapts to the evolving needs of modern IT environments.

  ¹https://gigaom.com/2024/01/30/the-evolution-of-endpoint-management/

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  The Tanium difference lies in our ability to provide real-time data and insights from Tanium XEM to make recommendations and automate actions based on AI insights, peer success rates, and customer risk thresholds.

  To learn more about the autonomous future of Converged Endpoint Management, contact us for a personalized demo.