It’s been a wild ride the past three years, and our team has learned an awful lot about the transformative power of digital technology and the exploitable vulnerability that it introduces. Here are some examples:

• Password authentication is no longer secure.
• Enterprise users and the devices they work on are under siege by threat actors.
• Bolt-on security is no longer a viable approach to securing our digital devices.
• Internal IT must also focus on innovative solutions, not updates and password resets.

A New Approach To Computer Selection

At one time, purchasing a computing device was straightforward. We selected units according to their resource and performance specifications. The laundry list included items such as a minimum processor speed, a given amount of RAM, and an ample amount of internal data storage. Security was added at the very end, via an antivirus software. If the OS happened to include a firewall, that was considered a bonus for some.

But those days are gone…

When companies sent employees home during the COVID outbreak, we found that 20% of all data breaches in 2020 were caused by a . For example, the compromise of a single device has major consequences because that device, according to a 2020 McKinsey Study, has access to an average of 17 million files. While 100% remote work may be ending its lifecycle by 2023, hybrid work is here to stay. This means your company requires computing devices that are just as secure outside of the corporate perimeter as they are within.

Lenovo: Security by Design

Lenovo realized years ago that the world would eventually desire a security-integrated computing device. So, they set out to design and build a comprehensive fleet of secure endpoint devices for a zero-trust world. They call it “Security by Design” and it is the foundation that Lenovo’s device portfolio is based upon. The premise is simple: A computing device today must be able to secure itself in a zero-trust environment. But while security is of the highest priority, Lenovo made sure that security doesn’t interfere with performance or workflows. After all, a secure device is worthless if it isn’t functional for today’s modernized worker. Below are some ways that Lenovo has melded security, functionality, and manageability into a single form factor.

The Lenovo Trusted Supplier Program

Computers are made up of many components supplied by multiple manufacturers. Therefore, a computing device is only as secure as its supply chain. Lenovo requires all their suppliers to complete a rigorous certification process that includes strict security requirements.

Root of Trust

When a Lenovo ThinkPad boots up, it performs a mandatory security checklist known as the “root of trust.” A central philosophy of zero trust is that the integrity of the system can never be assumed, which is why the ThinkShield platform verifies the integrity of the system every time it powers up. Lenovo firmware is digitally signed and TPM is used to verify the signature. If even a single process deviates from the norm, the boot-up is aborted. It’s just one example of how hardware-integrated security separates itself from bolt-on security that must be added after the device is built.

Frictionless Security

A password is a lottery ticket for a hacker as it gives them access to your company data. What’s more, in a zero-trust world, you must also protect users from keyloggers and shoulder surfing attacks. Lenovo knows how vulnerable passwords are, which is why they offer eight modes of frictionless secure authentication for their ThinkPad users. Examples include fingerprint and facial recognition thanks to integrated fingerprint readers and infra-red cameras. Lenovo gets you out of the lottery business.

Automated Manageability

In an era where cars drive themselves, you should be leading an IT department that houses an endpoint fleet fully capable of updating itself. With the Lenovo Thin Installer, updates are automatically conducted behind the scenes without any involvement from the end user and critical patches can be instantly delivered across an organization.

The Lenovo BIOS can even restore itself automatically to a clean, pre-breach known state in the event of an attack. Because it supports Windows Autopilot, ThinkPads can be deployed with zero-touch provisioning. All of this means less time that your IT talent can spend less time on mundane tasks that deter them from innovative tasks that add greater value.

Lifecycle Management

Lenovo recognizes that a computing device is a mini technology investment that must be judged according to its ROI. That is where lifecycle management is so important to Lenovo. When you consider its high-quality security integrated hardware, its flexible configuration options, allowed customization, and its ease of manageability, you begin to understand how Lenovo ThinkPads remain useful and relevant throughout their product cycle. When they do finally reach end-of-life, Lenovo will even securely dispose of them in an environmentally sensitive matter. If you don’t want Lenovo to wipe and dispose of your data, you can even keep the hard drives and oversee the process yourself.

Final Thoughts

If you look at how the world has changed, you see that Lenovo has transformed their ThinkPad fleet of endpoint devices in anticipation of all that change. The ThinkPad is the secure modern performance device your employees need to work securely and productively in today’s modernized zero-trust world.

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As an industry, it can be argued that healthcare experienced the greatest number of technological challenges at the height of the pandemic. Identifying and implementing the technology that was required for the early months of Covid tested even the most experienced of IT leaders. Radical changes occurred for administrative personnel, clinical personnel, and of course, patients and their families.

While many workplaces opted for a remote-only model, healthcare network teams everywhere had to support the needs of on-site operations and remote operations. This was on top of keeping hospitals, emergency rooms, urgent care centers, and critical outpatient clinics running as smoothly as possible. Never before had the needs of on-site clinicians, whose jobs were done under heavy duress, been so critical. The same goes for remote knowledge workers and honorable clinicians conducting their first telehealth appointments. 

Prior to 2020, telehealth was not an unknown concept to hospitals and the smaller clinics within their networks. However, it wasn’t exactly a focal point of care for most providers, either. The urgent need to discover innovative ways for clinicians to see patients and to allow staff to work safely from home accelerated the adoption of telehealth services and a focus on end-user computing transformation. Fast forward to summer 2022, and it’s clear this practice is unlikely to disappear once the pandemic is behind us. We now see how technology can help deliver healthcare services and lower critical operational costs. 

The Importance Of End-User Computing Transformation

The healthcare industry will continue to face challenges over the next few decades. A 2019 study by the found that by 2050, will be over the age of 65 and living with a chronic disease. This will inevitably result in an increase in healthcare spending and further the need for providers to reduce costs where they can to ensure funds are spent on patient care, not business processes.

The adoption of cloud-based end-user computing can improve productivity, help clinicians provide meaningful care, and enable technology teams to redesign services and approaches to healthcare. Ultimately, this allows for more virtual care and productive remote work. Despite this, there is immense pressure on healthcare providers to ensure the largest piece of the budget goes to clinical use cases as opposed to technology. 

The challenge, then, is to convince healthcare organizations that improving the end-user computing experience can deliver significant benefits.

As one health service CIO states, “We must also get past the notion that technology is unaffordable, and that the longer-term investment in technology, to enable care, should come ahead of shorter-term investment to address immediate pressures on healthcare services like staffing.” 

The Demand For Telehealth Services

Perhaps the biggest technology-led change we’ve seen in the healthcare industry is the increase in telehealth options for both inpatients and outpatients. Telehealth services enable patients and their trusted providers to be more connected and engage in real-time communication. Of course, if encouraged, patients can meet with their providers live and in-person, but if a routine appointment can be done remotely, then why not take advantage of this newfound convenience? Overworked and understaffed hospital personnel welcome the decrease in patient/visitor traffic, while safeguarding against the spread of infection is also being applied. 

Additionally, telehealth services provide remote access to health assessments, consultations, diagnoses, interventions, and more. Not only do patients have the ability to schedule an interactive telehealth appointment, but technology also allows them to receive appointment reminders, read critical notifications, view test results in a responsive patient portal and even utilize wearable devices that provide metrics on various health concerns. 

The increase in telehealth services, however, does create challenges for healthcare IT teams. Deploying and supporting these solutions with the necessary scalability, availability, and security needed introduces significant difficulties for these already overworked teams. 

Nutanix And Cybersecurity In The Healthcare Industry

The use of telehealth services, while beneficial to both the patient and the provider, opens up the potential for an increase in cyberattacks. In fact, of healthcare organizations experienced a ransomware attack in 2021, nearly double the number of attacks in 2020. There is clearly a significant need for health organizations to ensure their data is protected and that malware and ransomware are prevented. 

End-user computing improves security by eliminating the need to store data on a physical desktop that can be lost or stolen. Instead, private information is stored in a datacenter where it is managed, monitored, and protected.

Nutanix can help your telehealth services run more smoothly and efficiently with a focus on cybersecurity and protecting your organization from cybercriminals. It gives healthcare organizations the freedom to build modern hybrid and multi-cloud solutions with choice, simplicity, and flexibility, and delivers cloud-ready infrastructure combining compute, storage, virtualization, and networking, regardless of location. 

Among others, the benefits of utilizing for your end-user computing are:

• Built-in auditing and remediation: The software remains in compliance and doesn’t deviate from the original secure configuration.
• Streamlined patches and updates: Simplified upgrades for all software and firmware.
• Data-at-Rest Encryption: All data is encrypted using flexible methods.
• Least-privilege access: Users receive the least amount of privilege necessary for their roles.
• Role-based access control: Different security policies can be assigned to different groups and administrative levels.

Technology in the healthcare industry will continue to evolve, and with it comes the need to ensure your organization stays focused on end-user computing and cybersecurity. To learn more about how Nutanix can help your enterprise, contact WEI today.

Next Steps: Recent years have shown how critical the need for greater elasticity really is. This has accelerated the transition to hybrid cloud architectures that utilize the appropriate mix of both private and public clouds. Today’s advanced HCI solutions are designed for this new era. Download our tech brief titled,

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Hybrid work solutions. That’s a term that can make network administrators a little queasy if their hybrid workforce is consistently submitting IT support tickets for one common issue or another. Granted, the term “hybrid work solutions” was never really tossed around IT departments until just a few years ago. Now, it is the new standard for both your established workforce and those applying to vacant positions.

In the post-pandemic modern world, enterprises have experienced a rise in hybrid workers as the number of individuals working exclusively at home have continued to decrease. At a high level, the hybrid model serves as a happy medium for in-office and at-home preferences. to get work done from multiple locations, so creating a productive experience for them no matter where they are is your IT team’s ongoing priority.

Flexibility is the name of the game. According to a , 52% of employees want their employers to adopt hybrid work solutions. Employees recognize that there are times when working on-prem makes total sense as it fosters teamwork and collaboration, but they still want to retain the ability to work remotely for those times when location is an irrelevant factor. Because flexibility is so highly valued by professionals today, companies can use hybrid work models to attract and retain talent. It is also a way to lower costs while sustaining organizational productivity at the same time.

This is all great in theory, but what happens when the rubber meets the road? Are you, as an IT leader, ensuring your team delivers on a hybrid solution that satisfies all enterprise end users?

Dell Has Your Required Hybrid Work Solutions

Dell refers to today’s agile workforce as the Do-Anything-From-Anywhere World. To pull that off, businesses must ensure that their hybrid workers have the right tools for the job. That’s why Dell has placed such an incredible emphasis on ensuring they have the right portfolio of intelligent computing devices, accessories, software, and services that not only foster agility, but also facilitates greater productivity and security. That starts with offering persona-based PCs to satisfy the different needs of multiple employee roles.

Persona-Based Solutions

Workers need a complete endpoint solution to ensure they can work both autonomously and collaboratively. To do this, Dell is empowering their PCs with the power of AI. Dell Optimizer is an integrated AI software suite that provides intelligent privacy features to conceal sensitive information within unsecure environments. It features the world’s first simultaneous multi-network connection that allows users to connect to two wired or wireless networks at once for faster data transfers and downloads. Dell Optimizer can even analyze a worker’s immediate surroundings and utilize neural-noise cancellation technology to ensure that remote communicative sessions are audibly clear and pristine.

Flexibility at the Enterprise Level

Enterprise leaders must always remind themselves that flexibility isn’t just a demand from clients. Forward-minded companies must also be agile enough to quickly adapt to the fast-changing dynamic business environments of today. That’s a fancy way of saying you must support your workforce, too. Are you certain you have the right technology infrastructure in place for the coming years? Do you know how much storage capacity and processing power you will need in 2023 or 2024? Think about how useless the forecasts you made in 2019 for the coming year were because of the pandemic and supply chain challenges. The old way of capitalizing large infrastructure deployments is simply outdated.

Companies can no longer continue the expensive practice of overprovisioning and investing in long-term fixed assets – this is far too risky. Companies need adaptive technology solutions that provides flexibility in resource allotment and finance allocation. That’s why Dell Apex Flex on Demand is the right solution at the right time.

What is APEX Flex on Demand?

gives you the ability to not only acquire the right technology you need but to also scale the right amount, so you only pay for what you use. We aren’t talking about a cloud-first solution, but you are financing in a similar fashion to the cloud. Remember, we’re still talking about allocating storage, server, hyper converged infrastructure, and data protection services on-prem. Apex Flex on Demand threads the needle to meet the balance of cost and flexibility in a way that was unimaginable just a few years ago.

What you’re paying for isn’t hardware or software. You pay for actual capacity usage. Whether it’s a server or a storage repository, utilization is comprised of two components: Committed capacity and buffer capacity. Our team will help you establish what your fixed committed capacity should be and how much buffered capacity will be required in the future. You aren’t billed for that buffer by default, but if the need arises for it, you instantly have access to it. Because buffered capacity is billed at a higher rate, you can modify the capacity ratio to adjust to workloads that have increased beyond the initial committed capacity to reduce costs.

Deployment and Payment Made Simple

Dell delivers and deploys your desired technology on-prem according to best practice and configured with your predicted capacity ratio. Raw and usable capacity data is measured throughout each day to create a daily and monthly average using locally installed software. This usage data is then securely uploaded to the Dell Financial Services Database where it is validated, verified, and processed by a billing specialist. Reports are then made available to the customer for validation prior to payment. Some of the benefits that customers have realized include the following:

• A 25% lower storage acquisition cost
• Deploying new storage capacity proved 92% faster
• Costs due to unplanned outages fell by 64%

If these positives are not enough, please consider this: While there are similar solutions abound, Dell is the only solution provider that caps monthly at 85% usage of total installed capacity.

Conclusion

You can refer to it by a variety of “as-a-Service” connotations. The best way to sum up Dell’s Flex on Demand offering may be Innovation-as-a-Service. It’s just another example of how Dell is providing the right hybrid work solutions that companies need for both now and in the future. It’s time for you to ensure that your business objectives are satisfied in a totally dynamic world.

Next Steps: that explains how Dell Technologies has elevated the hybrid work experience for both end users and IT administrators. We focus on the perspectives of privacy, connectivity, and collaboration.

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Hybrid work has now replaced remote work as the new buzz word. Let’s be clear, however. Hybrid in this context represents mobility. Employees are going to be mobile, and the definition of the employee workspace is now changed forever.

The corporate office will become the hub of innovation, collaboration, and social interaction while the remote workspace will be where employees knock out work assignments and partake in their strings of video conferences. As the indicated, the five-day office week is probably over.

New Modern-Day PC is Needed

In 2020, companies rushed their employees out the door to the safety of their homes in response to the COVID outbreak. Back then, the aim was simply to get some sort of mobile device into the hands of those employees as quickly as possible. There was no time to think things through in that mad rush. But things have now calmed down and its evident that a new type of PC is required to enable the new mobile modern-day workforce. There was a time in which employees had a robust workstation at the office along with a mobile device that was sufficient to get them through while at home or on the road. That is no longer the case. Users need the same robust experience regardless of which workspace they happen to be operating from. A remote human experience depends on 4K ultra-HD videos, superior audio quality and screen sharing capabilities. These machines must have the resources to power these experiences along with multitasking and file transfers on top of it all. And then there is the issue of security as many of these machines will often operate in consumer grade networking environments. Sounds like we are going to need a whole lot more computers in the coming year.

The Great Refresh is Coming

Companies are recognizing that a supplementary computing device will not serve the needs of the modern-day workforce. Now consider the fact that Windows 11 has now been made available. It could be that of the great PC refresh. Both are projecting that PC shipments will be greater than 340 million units next year with continued demand through 2025. There are more things to consider for this looming refresh than computer specs and features. The way in which enterprises provision, manage, and support these machines must adapt to hybrid work models as well.

Traditional Provisioning Practices are Outdated

The old-style tradition of handing over a new corporate laptop to a user is a thing of the past. New hires need to have a corporate computing device in their hands on day one, regardless of where that first day on the job is spent. Existing employees need their essential devices refreshed without any disruption or making a special trip into the office. Dell deployment takes the mundane burdens of imaging and setting configurations out of the hands of internal IT and deliver devices right to the door of whatever workspace your users might be residing at the time with all the applications and settings preconfigured at the Dell factory. According to an IDC whitepaper, a zero-touch deployment helped reduced PC deployment times as much as 50 percent.

Are you Still Relying on Traditional Helpdesk Ticketing for Support?

It’s not just network latency you have to worry about. Work efficiency today is reliant on a proficient workstation experience. Small computer problems create latency throughout the workday. That’s why end user support is so critical today. But how does internal IT support remote machines? How do they get access to the BIOS and initiate a system reboot from afar? How much time is wasted having end users submit a ticket that must be read before being addressed?

The modern-day workforce requires a modern-day support system, and that is what Dell ProSupport Suite provides. The number of tickets drop when you have AI-driven telemetry and predictive analytics working to detect and proactively prevent issues involving operating systems, software upgrades, driver updates, patches, malware, and applicable hardware failures. Dell ProSupport Suite for PCs gives your IT teams complete visibility into their PC fleet as well as performance recommendations. According to a report conducted last year, customers using Dell ProSupport Plus resolved hard drive issues up to 84 percent faster. Should additional support ever be needed, your IT teams have access to advanced technology experts at any time who are specifically trained on every aspect of these devices.

Modern-Day PC Management

You can’t rely on Group Policy or on-premise systems to manage your remote PCs. With VMware Workspace ONE, your devices can be securely accessed from anywhere and your users can retain the same unified workspace across all their devices. According to a Forrester Study, Workspace One integration can help reduce resolution time for support calls by up to 50 percent. If you already have your own systems management platform such as Microsoft Endpoint Manager, that’s fine too as Dell can add your new machines into your existing environment.

Protecting the Modern-Day Workforce

A remote workspace must be considered a zero-trust environment. That means remote data is constantly under threat, which is why you need Dell Trusted devices. It’s not enough to safeguard PCs at or above the OS level. Dell gives you full visibility underneath the covers, giving you access to BIOS events and indicators of attack deep below the OS surface. Dell SafeGuard and Response uses AI and machine learning to identify and respond to hidden attacks. You also have the peace of mind that all sensitive data is automatically encrypted using Dell SafeData.

It’s not just your legacy machines you need to refresh. It’s your legacy approaches to provisioning, managing, supporting and securing those machines that need updating as well. Dell can upgrade it all, ensuring that you are prepared for the new modern-day workforce that needs to get to work.

Are Your Looking For A Partner To Support Your Remote Workforce?

is committed to helping enterprises transform the way they do business. To support this, innovation is at the forefront of all their solutions, enabling you to transform your infrastructure and accelerate the innovation you need to stay competitive. We have expertise across all Dell systems and can help architect a custom solution to achieve your desired business outcomes.

NEXT STEPS: Your business needs technology that is flexible enough to support a hybrid workforce. Download our tech brief for the TOP FIVE ways modern technology is empowering the remote workforce in our paper below.

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