The four pillars of optimised enterprise computing

The world has become far more complicated. For businesses, the need to balance employee safety, changed expectations about how and where we work and the changing threat landscape have changed the very nature of how we use our computers. While users have always wanted safe, reliable and high performing PCs and notebooks, delivering that in the post-pandemic world is harder than ever before. And with workplaces and teams distributed more widely than ever before, manageability has taken on a whole new set of challenges.

Performance

Organisations need to ensure the computing platform they choose can deliver the performance they need while being as energy efficient as possible. The winner of a Grand Prix isn’t the fastest car. It’s the fastest car that stays in the race the longest. Performance is about more than the fastest CPU; it’s about ensuring you have the right processor, chipset, network and firmware all tuned to work together in harmony and at peak efficiency.

Great performance is about ensuring your computing platform tick all those boxes.

Security

If we think about that Grand Prix winning car, as well as having a powerful motor and great fuel efficiency so it can race faster for longer, it is also equipped with a variety of equipment to ensure the driver and those around them keep safe. Today’s threat environment moves faster and can impact an organisation faster than ever before. The adversaries are constantly changing how they attack and are exploiting newly discovered vulnerabilities.

New software patches, to thwart emerging threats and mitigate the risks of vulnerabilities, need to be easily and quickly deployed. Organisations need to be able to protect their data which demands the capability to remotely fix or wipe devices is also important should a device be lost or stolen.

The technology platform you choose needs built-in, multilayer hardware-based security above and below the operating system to help defend against attacks so IT teams can react quickly when a threat is detected without slowing users down, even when PCs are far from home. Security needs to be built into the technology platform by design and not bolted in as an afterthought.

Manageability

The COVID pandemic has changed the nature of work. Teams are now more distributed than ever so IT teams can’t rely on physical access to systems in order to support them. Old-school remote access systems were difficult to deploy and only gave IT teams limited ability to diagnose and fix problems.

Today’s computing platforms enable IT teams to remotely log in to users’ laptops to fix most issues, even if an operating system fails. Technology management and support teams need a platform that allows them to remotely log in to the device, wipe it if necessary and reinstall the operating systems and applications. This is a game changer for remote support.

A powerful manageability platform gives full KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) capability throughout the power cycle – including uninterrupted control of the desktop when an operating system loads. And it allows authorised support people the ability to access and reconfigure the BIOS so every aspect of the user’s experience can be controlled and optimised.

Stability

A winning Formula One car is more than the sum of its individual parts and a great PC is more than just hardware. An optimised platform ensures all the parts of the system work together perfectly so it doesn’t let users down or make support harder.

That requires the computing platform to be rigorously tested. And, as well as offering benefits for users in their day to day work, a stable platform delivers smoother fleet management. With the cost of supporting a PC estimated at around $5000 per year according to Gartner, building an easy-to-manage and stable fleet of computers using a well-designed and thoroughly tested computing platform can deliver great value to organisations.

For organisations looking for a platform that supports these four pillars, they need to look for computers that are built on a platform that enables them to deliver great performance and security on a stable platform that ensures they can keep working and be supported whenever they need the assistance of their IT team.

Whether you’re in education and need to support students on and off campus, or a large business with team members distributed across the world, the Intel vPro platform delivers the performance, security, manageability and stability organisations need to meet the demands of today.