Security

Review: Ivanti Unified Endpoint Manager Eases Device Visibility

This reliable platform gives higher ed IT security teams visibility and control over every endpoint in their networks.

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John Breeden II is an award-winning reviewer with more than 20 years of experience covering technology. Follow him on Twitter @TheLabGuys.

Higher education institutions handle a lot of sensitive information, from financial records to student grades. Yet many universities struggle when it comes to providing enough IT or security resources to protect their networks or environment. That’s one reason why education is quickly becoming one of the most attacked sectors.

Thankfully, the cloud-based Ivanti Unified Endpoint Manager was designed with that environment in mind. It allows smaller IT departments to effectively employ automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to manage a massive number of mobile endpoints, even if they don’t share a common operating system or are deployed across the organization.

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New Devices Can’t Hide on a Higher Ed Institution’s Network

The first step with Ivanti UEM is discovery, which is extremely quick. Our test network was able to find Windows desktops and laptops, Android and iOS smartphones, several Chromebook tablets, and even a Raspberry Pi system (which is technically an Internet of Things device).

Once detected, information about all of those systems was moved to the central console, where the entire enterprise could be managed, monitored and protected. This discovery process is ongoing, so any new device that attempts to connect to a protected network is immediately discovered and categorized.

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The central management console gives a lot of useful information about the devices it’s watching, including what operating systems and versions the devices are running and whether they’re up to date with security patches.

From there, administrators can begin to set the policies that will be required for all devices to maintain access. Those policies can be extremely granular. For example, the finance team could operate under different rules than the admissions staff.

IT leaders can also set up AI-informed alerts and automatic healing or problem-solving based on common security issues, freeing staff to concentrate on mission-critical tasks.

There is even a digital employee experience component to Ivanti UEM that measures how easy it is for people to access and use their applications. Based on DEX information, Ivanti UEM allows administrators to provision and configure applications so that they are easy to use and consistent across the organization.

Ivanti UEM makes it possible for smaller IT teams working in higher education to manage, protect and streamline thousands of endpoints from a central location. It’s easy to deploy and operate and can quickly scale up as needed. All of that makes it a great tool for those struggling to maintain their defenses as colleges and universities continue to evolve.

SPECIFICATIONS

Product type: Cloud-based endpoint management and security
Deployment: Software as a Service
Device types supported: Windows, macOS and iOS, Linux, Chrome and Android, and Raspberry Pi endpoints
Capabilities: Enterprisewide endpoint discovery, policy compliance, provisioning, management and monitoring
Optional: Patch management, data loss prevention and vulnerability management

Protecting Higher Ed Institutions

Scaling up the Ivanti UEM platform as new devices are added to a higher ed institution is so streamlined that it’s practically automatic. But there are also ways to add new capabilities to the platform as needs change and an organization’s security maturity improves.

The baseline version of the Ivanti UEM platform, Secure UEM Professional, incorporates quite a few extremely useful features. It’s the version that was tested for this review and includes device discovery, security policy enforcement, the self-healing of many core or common problems, DEX evaluation, and even the ability to remotely access and fix most user problems. That is a lot of powerful tools and may be all that many institutions need, at least at first.

Moving to the next program tier, Secure UEM Professional Plus, adds several new security tools to the mix. And because higher tiers include everything in the lower ones, new features can be seamlessly added to existing deployments whenever needed.

One of the most useful features of the Plus tier for higher ed is data loss prevention. Basically, the platform can be used to ensure that extremely protected data, such as student information, can exist only on approved devices. So, you can set a policy that, for example, prevents student data from being saved or shared using monitored mobile devices. The Plus tier also includes a tunnel program that can lock down the pathways between users, devices and data. Finally, it adds the ability to create and provision fully secure mobile devices for use in extremely critical or highly sensitive areas.

The top tier for the Ivanti UEM platform is called Secure UEM Premium. In addition to everything in the Professional and Plus tiers, Premium includes the ability to perform extremely detailed vulnerability management. This would allow IT teams to discover potential security problems within their environments and fix them before they can be found and exploited by attackers. Premium also includes a robust patch management feature that plugs vulnerabilities across all devices simultaneously and then monitors to ensure that they stay in compliance.

The Plus and Premium tiers of the Ivanti UEM platform require a bit more knowledge and experience from administrators and IT teams and may be more than smaller organizations need for their initial endpoint management efforts. Because of that, Ivanti has made it possible for healthcare facilities [S1] to install only the powerful first tier of the program, giving many organizations everything they need while saving money. Later, it’s easy to upgrade as needs change without forcing users to learn a new interface and without any compatibility issues with existing defenses.