What is your New Year’s resolution for 2022? Well, it is that time of year again! My resolutions are not necessarily new, but a continuation of several that I have made in prior years. Eat healthier foods, lose weight, and save money are the ones that immediately come to mind. Another best practice that I started several years ago was to adopt a passwordless authentication initiative for all my internet connected personal devices.

This gives new meaning to the term “wired and tired.” A brand-new survey from Ivanti finds that IT professionals have never been considered more critical to a company’s operations and success, and yet in spite of – or perhaps because of – that pressure, they’re facing a mountain of obstacles and unrelenting fatigue.

Over the last year, labour shortages and supply chain challenges have created a perfect storm, creating a business landscape marked by strained resources and little room for error. The 2021 holiday season ramped up pressure on businesses that are already struggling to keep up.

The two words, “Enterprise Architecture”, elicit various reactions and have no standard definition in the dictionary or technical manual— everything from “we tried that and it’s too much work” to “we need that!” to “what does it mean to have an effective EA practice”. Trial and error also taught us it’s possible (even easy) to do Enterprise Architecture incorrectly!

Validating for us our outstanding portfolio, vision, and ecosystem in the Unified Endpoint Management market, Ivanti was recently named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Unified Endpoint Management, Q4 2021 report. Furthermore, Ivanti was noted as the only vendor in the market that could provide a fully integrated UEM, ESM, and End-User Experience Management (EUEM) capability.

Two-thirds of US white-collar employees are working from home some or all of the time, according to a September 2021 Gallup survey – and of those, 91 percent hope to continue to do so even after the pandemic. In this Everywhere Workplace environment, a “bring your own device” (BYOD) policy is an appealing proposition for employees and IT departments alike, leading to an average annual savings of $350 per employee and a 34 percent increase in productivity.

The last time Forrester published their Wave report for Enterprise Service Management in 2019, the world had never heard of COVID-19 and workers were, for the most part, still going to offices. IT and other lines of businesses had a basic handle on servicing their employees’ needs. Today, about 2 years after the first COVID-19 cases started showing up, the world is a very different place.

We’re thrilled to announce that Frost & Sullivan has awarded the 2021 Asia-Pacific Company of the Year Award for secure remote access to Pulse Secure (acquired by Ivanti). In determining awards, Frost & Sullivan “applies a rigorous analytical process” that includes “detailed evaluation of best practices criteria.”

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Most of us remember the months and weeks leading up to the deadline. We did whatever needed to be done to achieve compliance. Now it seems like a distant memory. And the pressure is mostly off. But in other ways, it was just the beginning. As you continue creating your day-to-day compliance strategy, you might find that the tactics that got you to the finish line were more short-term solutions that won’t necessarily stand long-term.

Last week, close to 800 IT professionals met in Orlando, Florida at HDI’s Support World Live conference. HDI events are always wonderful for catching up on trends, new innovations and best practices.