Transform legacy systems in the journey to modern cloud services

A 2023 survey by Statista and Okta found that over 71% of European companies now allow employees to work remotely as often as three days a week. Yet many businesses continue to work with an IT infrastructure and management tools built to support workers on-premise.

Supporting a hybrid workforce involves a different set of requirements, including the ability to monitor, manage and secure devices without hands-on access, at scale and at speed. Businesses need to be able to operate and maintain applications across on-premise infrastructure and the cloud. Most of all, organisations need visibility across the whole IT estate. With on-premise systems and platform-specific tools, this kind of visibility and control becomes extremely challenging.

“You know, in theory, everybody’s home is a separate office,” says HP Senior Product Manager, Trevor Gordon. “Imagine trying to support that from a physical presence perspective. That would be hard.” When going hands-on is no longer practical, businesses need a modern, cloud-based approach that’s built to do the job.

With HP Adaptive Endpoint Management and HP Proactive Insights, businesses can move their endpoint management to the cloud, and enjoy significantly higher levels of visibility across the whole device fleet, plus the ability to manage and secure those devices at scale. Updates for Windows, Office 365 and Endpoint Management apps are automated and zero touch, involving little or no disruption to employee productivity. Meanwhile, the movement of on-premise infrastructure management workloads to the cloud, including local app and policy distributions, reduces the burden on over-stretched IT resources.

“If you look at customers today, they’re getting hit with budget cuts,” says Trevor Gordon. “They’re saying, not only, that they need to do more with less, but that they also want to be able to track, trace and know that their employees are having a great digital experience.” HP Adaptive Endpoint Management provides these capabilities, while HP Proactive Insights enables IT teams to harness device-level telemetry data to pinpoint and remediate issues before they impact employees.

“Data is critically important,” Gordon adds, “because, if you have great data, you can make easy decisions.” With HP Adaptive Endpoint Management and Proactive Insights, organisations can see what end users are doing and how they’re doing it, how applications are performing and where failures or bottlenecks occur. They can then use the insights from that data to improve the employee experience in significant and measurable ways.

Making the transition

Migrating to a cloud-based system is never a simple, one-size-fits-all process, but HP’s approach allows companies to move at their own pace, with HP working with the business to understand its specific device and application environments, define integration points and map out the move in advance. HP also helps with the transition, building the management solution and rehosting legacy apps and workloads in the cloud.

This doesn’t mean a loss of choice. Businesses can work through how they enroll and manage existing devices – from multiple manufacturers as well as HP – and how they enforce security policies and roll out OS patches and driver of firmware updates. “We’ve built out services to get you up and running quickly,” notes Gordon. “They’re standardised, built and ready to go, and I think that gives you the ability to get there quickly, even with some of the complexities that we’d have to work through on the side.”

And with time, there’s scope to integrate with HP’s Device as a Service, including home delivery, automated, zero-touch setup and advanced unit exchange. “The beauty of what we do is that we work with the customer to outline the best model for them,” says Gordon. Because HP builds flexibility into its product stack and contractual models, the organisation’s endpoint management services can evolve with its business needs.

To find out more about HP’s services and how they could help you transition to a modern IT model, visit HP Services – PC Services for Commercial Enterprise and SMB IT | HP® United Kingdom.

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