Enterprise IT teams are often built on legacy structures, designed to support fixed teams working within an office or other centralized location. In today’s connected landscape, however, employees are using devices at job sites, in moving vehicles, and at other remote locations far from the safety of a central network perimeter or the direct support of an IT person in the same building.
The distributed nature of work in industries like utilities, telecommunications, construction, public safety, agriculture, home healthcare, and others that rely on teams in the field to get the job done often leaves IT teams stuck in reactive mode. Workers put in a ticket only when something breaks, and troubleshooting often requires shipping the device back to the head office for manual evaluation and repair. Meanwhile, maintaining consistency in app versions and security solutions across distributed devices becomes increasingly difficult as organizations scale.
Cloud-based IT solutions are changing that dynamic by enabling real-time visibility, centralized monitoring and management, and scalable support for employees and their tech from virtually anywhere. When combined with rugged solutions, this capability even extends into situations when teams must operate in harsh conditions or remote locations.
IT Support Services Offer Real-Time Visibility Across Distributed Environments
As most IT professionals know, they can’t resolve issues they can’t see.
When devices operate outside the line of sight of the IT team, issues such as connectivity failures, failing batteries, or poor application performance may go entirely unnoticed until some type of operational disruption actually occurs. By then, the impact has already spiraled, resulting in frustrated workers and interrupted workflows.
Cloud-based IT solutions enable continuous visibility of distributed mobile assets. For example, Panasonic Connect’s TOUGHBOOK® Smart Essentials gives IT teams centralized dashboards and real-time monitoring, granting the ability to see:
- Device health and performance metrics
- Connectivity and signal strength
- Network and carrier performance trends
- Usage patterns and geolocation data across devices
- Identifying and resolving issues faster
- Reducing device downtime that drives up operating costs
- Making data-driven decisions about network and carrier partnerships
- Improving productivity on the frontline by minimizing disruptions
Rather than relying on users to report when something is wrong with a device, IT can see the anomaly and address it before it escalates. This level of monitoring lets IT departments pinpoint issues with much greater precision, including those outside the device itself, such as poor carrier performance in certain regions.
When the IT department can see the full deployed device network in real-time, they can stop reacting to ticket after ticket and begin:
Perhaps the greatest benefit of this level of visibility is the way it reduces the IT department's support burden over time. IT can spend less time troubleshooting and more time optimizing systems and working on higher-value projects. Enterprise mobility management turns from a labor-intensive maintenance task into a strategic benefit for the organization.
Bolstering IT Department Security with TOUGHBOOK Total Defense
For IT departments, improving visibility also has the notable side effect of highlighting gaps in security. The modern enterprise attack surface has expanded greatly in recent years. Bad actors have added mobile endpoints to their list of targets, hoping to gain access to corporate networks, systems, and proprietary data.
These threats create a difficult balancing act for IT department leaders, who must establish a consistent and effective security posture that encompasses all devices, whether they are down the hall in an office or at a remote job site halfway across the country, and whether they are on- or off-network or completely offline.
Cloud-based security solutions can be highly effective at identifying and combatting cybersecurity threats, especially at the operating system (OS) level. However, these tools are best supported by a layered approach that can detect vulnerabilities below the OS as well.
This is why Panasonic Connect embeds security directly into its rugged laptops and tablets via TOUGHBOOK Total Defense. Rather than treating security as something to add on, TOUGHBOOK Total Defense layers security at each level of the device via:
- TOUGHBOOK Guard to verify the integrity of hardware components before the operating system boots up.
- Smart Compliance powered by Eclypsium, which validates the integrity of the device’s firmware and highlights potential vulnerabilities.
- Sentinel One’s AI-driven threat detection and response against advanced attacks, even when devices are offline.
- Absolute Secure Endpoint for continuous visibility, control, and self-healing.
Total Defense provides IT departments with a robust, holistic tool for detecting cyber threats. When combined with Smart Essentials, IT personnel gain an extremely advanced level of awareness and control, allowing them to detect vulnerabilities earlier, reduce the risk of security breaches, and deploy mobile devices into the field with confidence.
Supporting Cloud Intelligence with Enterprise IT Support Services
While cloud solutions offer significant advantages to an enterprise, there is still one gap that many organizations struggle to close. Deploying devices at scale still requires careful planning and coordination backed by physical labor. That is where professional IT support services come in.
TOUGHBOOK Professional Services functions as an extension of the IT department, helping organizations translate their device management and cloud intelligence into real-world benefits. Professional Services helps IT teams save time by handling a variety of labor-intensive tasks, such as:
- Device configuration, imaging, and staging
- Integration with enterprise IT infrastructure
- Ongoing diagnostics, monitoring, and support
- Asset tracking and lifecycle management
When devices are fully configured and ready to use out of the box, teams reach full productivity faster. Cloud deployment services from Panasonic Connect can streamline this process even further by leveraging technologies such as Windows Autopilot and zero-touch enrollment to provision devices remotely, which lets users power on, connect, and start working immediately.
These services are purposefully designed to reduce logistical complexity for IT departments while ensuring consistency across device deployments. Every device gets configured to the same exact standards, with security policies applied and applications installed automatically.
Instead of managing every new company device rollout manually, IT teams can focus on IT infrastructure modernization and other long-term strategies while Panasonic Professional Services handles deployment.
Complete Support for Your Enterprise IT Department
The cloud has been changing the way we think about IT for many years already, but in enterprise environments with distributed operations in hazardous or harsh operating conditions, maintaining the value of the cloud depends on staying connected. Leveraging a combination of cloud-based IT solutions, rugged laptops, 2-in-1 tablets, and professional IT services ensures that workers deployed on the frontline stay connected as much as possible — and remain secure even when they can’t.
To see how Panasonic Connect can help you modernize your IT infrastructure with a mix of cloud-based visibility, embedded security, and end-to-end IT support services, explore our Professional Services.