Leveraging Data and Automation with Workspace ONE Intelligence
The "modern digital workspace" is constantly expanding and evolving. Far from the days of traditional corporate IT and "you get what you get" resource allotment, today's users expect to utilize multiple devices, applications and platforms daily to perform their jobs. While empowering for users, this fundamental shift places an increased burden on IT to monitor, manage and secure the ever changing landscape of endpoints and applications.
As this landscape expands and evolves, the ability to gain insights across the entire enterprise and act on that information becomes increasingly crucial. The increasing number of devices per user and types of device platforms complicates IT's ability to assess and understand risks in the environment. These various platforms are often managed by different tools or systems which lack the ability to be aware of or integrate with other platforms, resulting in multiple myopic, "siloed" views of the overall environment. Additionally, having several device management systems within an enterprise causes difficulty in managing the exponential increase in applications, versions and methods for deployment.
For example, providing Microsoft Outlook to users may now involve Windows, Mac, iOS and Android versions – all potentially deployed and managed by different systems. If a serious vulnerability is identified in Outlook, how can IT quickly identify all versions on all platforms that are at risk and quickly deploy the critical patch or new version?
VMware Workspace ONE Intelligence is a part of the Workspace ONE platform which enables IT to gather data and information from across the spectrum of deployed endpoint devices and present the information in a unified console. Customizable dashboards allow admins to quickly visualize and evaluate information such as device type, patch deployment and compliance and application utilization. Reports provide scheduling and sharing capabilities to provide information to management and other teams for archival or additional analysis. These dashboards and reports can span device platforms to present a holistic view of the environment as well as endpoints per user.
The default dashboard provides a quick view of several different points of interest.
The dashboard and its included widgets are customizable and each widget can be clicked to view additional information. In this example, I have clicked the Top 10 KB Installs widget to see more details.
Leveraging the customizable dashboard and reporting capabilities, IT can quickly query for key data and retrieve results across the entire device landscape from a single console. In our previous example, IT could query for all installed versions of Microsoft Outlook and see data for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android platforms without having to go to multiple management systems. This ability to visualize and report on data across the environment can improve response times to known issues and increase compliance with security and other policies.
While the dashboard and reporting capabilities of Workspace ONE Intelligence are important, the real power of the product comes from its integrated robust automation capabilities. IT often has an abundance of tools that can show information, but very few that can take automated actions based on that information. As device counts and types grow, automation helps prevent IT from becoming overwhelmed. With Workspace ONE Intelligence, IT can configure condition-based automated workflows to perform desired actions without requiring manual intervention. Several automation connectors are available, including Slack, Workspace ONE UEM (Unified Endpoint Management) and ServiceNow among others. These connectors allow Workspace ONE Intelligence to request actions from those systems based on gathered and analyzed data. Actions from the different connectors can be combined to create a rich remediation workflow.
Automation workflows can be manually created based on selected criteria. Additionally, every dashboard widget and report can be used as the quick-start basis for a condition-based automation. Continuing our example above, IT could use the dashboard they created to identify all deployments of Outlook as the basis of an automated remediation workflow. The automation could open a ServiceNow ticket per user and send a Slack message to the user's manager if the critical patch or new version is needed. Then, taking it a step further, Workspace ONE UEM could schedule the patch or app for installation and force the deployment if it is not performed within a specified timeframe.
Another example of leveraging Workspace ONE Intelligence is one where users can install their own applications and upgrade their endpoint device operating systems. If there are applications made available by IT that are not compatible with new OS versions (e.g. MacOS Catalina), IT could create a dashboard listing all versions of MacOS used in the enterprise. Using that dashboard as the basis of an automation workflow, IT could send an email or Slack message to a user who has upgraded their endpoint to Catalina stating the known application compatibility issues. Additionally, IT could remove the apps that are incompatible and make compatible versions or alternatives available to the user and inform them of these options. This automated workflow provides proactive user support and improves the user experience.
The automation capabilities of Workspace ONE Intelligence can also be leveraged by security products that are a member of the Workspace ONE Trust Network. This integration enables select security products to instantiate actions based on detected threats or issues such as enterprise wipe of a device, deployment of configuration profiles to block certain device capabilities and automated ServiceNow ticket creation. This combination of security and device management provides powerful insights into risk factors across several device types and automated remediation of detected issues.
If you would like to learn more about VMware Workspace ONE Intelligence or gain hands-on experience with the solution, you have options:
- Launch our Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub lab
- Request a Workspace ONE workshop
- Connect with us via Webex for a complimentary Digital Employee Experience briefing!