When your business purchases a new computer for an employee, what does the deployment of that system look like immediately after procurement?

I’m not talking about the setup and configuration of the employee’s account. I’m talking about how long it takes to physically present that device to the staff member once it physically arrives at the door of your information technology team.

If your business doesn’t have the capability of delivering a fully configured endpoint to a user without first passing through IT’s hands, then your business is participating in an inefficient and antiquated deployment strategy. Don’t get me wrong, in certain circumstances IT must be involved with endpoint deployment but the days of spending hours configuring the device itself are long gone.

Back in the day, we used to use things like Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), Windows Deployment Services (WDS), or……sit down…. Ghost. We relied on something called a “Golden Image”. The reason these tools were used was so that IT could deploy an endpoint with all applications and operating system parameters fully configured. In other words, the main benefit to these tools was efficiency. Without them, a tech could spend a day or more deploying a single endpoint.

While the tools were great, they required infrastructure like servers, storage, and hardware of some kind. Maximizing uptime on these systems was paramount because of the productivity increases they provided to IT. Therefore, the servers, storage, and hardware needed redundancy. As you can imagine, all of this was costly.

Today, most technology has shifted to the cloud and that includes automated system configuration and deployment. Servers, storage, hardware, and a local network are no longer needed. Instead, those elements have been replaced by cloud-based services and an internet connection from anywhere in the world. This automated approach to endpoint deployment is facilitated from a single pane of glass within a cloud-based ecosystem.

When a system is purchased from an OEM like Dell, HP, or Lenovo the serial number is pre-populated in the cloud. Then, when the device is unboxed, powered on, and connected to the internet it will pull down the necessary applications, configuration profiles, and required user settings. You can even associate a deployment with an employee’s role ensuring that each employee’s machine is customized to their specific job function. All that’s left is for the user to login with their credentials.

If your team is not using automation in this manner to configure and deploy endpoints securely, then they are burning valuable hours performing tasks that have been obsolesced by modern tools. IT staff are better utilized providing support than building, configuring, and deploying endpoints. Modern endpoint deployments can be reduced to ~30 minutes with modern deployment tools.

At Auxzillium, we don’t always learn something new. Sometimes we’re the ones waiting for technology to keep up with us. Your business can only benefit from that approach to innovation.