As companies diversify to augment offerings and create new revenue streams, it falls to CIOs to make informed decisions on how to deliver these enhanced services, writes Nick Offin, Head of Sales, Marketing and Operations, dynabook Northern Europe.
Nick Offin
IT leaders when making those decisions have to contend with three key evolutions in today’s technology environment; the imminent arrival of 5G connectivity, ever diversifying security threats, and proliferation of mobile working.
Within such an environment, technology’s role as an enabler has never been more important, and so implementing the right solutions in a quick, effective and reliable manner should be a key priority for today’s IT decision makers . The ‘PC as a Service’ model, a concept in which business devices and services are subscribed to rather than owned, is emerging as an effective business model to achieve a tech refresh not just now but on an ongoing basis.
Hardware the Keystone Within a Broader IT Infrastructure
When implementing PC as a Service, devices remain integral. As consumer devices become easier to use and workers become more au fait with them and their increasing functionality, there is a risk they will prefer such tools over their business device and therefore use them as an alternative. This brings risks around security.
According to a 2018 BYOD Security Report from Bitglass, less than a third of IT experts are confident in their cyber security practices for personal and mobile devices. IT leaders thus need to ensure their business device fleet is kept up-to-date, reliable, portable, secure and stylish.
Different Devices for Different Roles
Within an advanced architecture incorporating cloud, IoT and edge solutions, how do you determine what’s best and seamlessly roll these out across an enterprise workforce? This can be a complicated, time-intensive task with the need to keep downtime within the roll-out and integration periods to a minimum.
A Gartner report suggests network downtime of any decription costs organisations anything from $140K to $540K p/hour. Hence, the value of effective deployment support in removing these risks cannot be underestimated. Services that offer on-site installation, disablement of redundant devices and secure data migration across platforms all play a part in a seemless transition from old to new.
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Lifecycle management
Adopting a PC as a Service model as part of an IT strategy is not just about picking a device and rolling it out to your workforce. Lifecycle management is increasingly valuable in this mobile professional world, particularly where devices can break or be lost or stolen whilst on the move. Similarly, organisations face an increasingly advanced cyber threat landscape as criminals innovate with new techniques.
What’s more, as workforces become increasingly fragmented geographically, the need for better collaboration becomes a necessity. This again comes back to operational efficiency and ensuring support is always there. Thus, IT leaders need PC as a Service for end-to-end support, from day one to day one thousand (and beyond).
PC as a Service
In order for businesses to be able to move with the ever evolving tech landscape and remain competitive, the timing of a refresh is key. CIOs must consider its current IT offering and its ability to be able to cope with changing environments. Within this new world, a tech refresh is about more than just devices – you need to consider how different technologies will play together within the broader infrastructure.
On top of this, the long term cost-effective nature of the model makes for a stronger case to act. Greater competition, greater user expectations and greater security threats all mean a seamless device fleet experience is essential from implementation through to end-of-life. A fully integrated PC as a Service option is key to achieving this.
