Intelligence-driven, digital workspace

“Empowered employees are at the heart of digital transformation. However, providing employees with the tools they need to improve productivity introduces operational complexity and increased cyber threats as apps, devices and networks proliferate and the security perimeter dissolves,” explained Sumit Dhawan, senior vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware. “Our new intelligence-driven digital workspace platform and partner ecosystem help customers leverage the power of insights, automation and predictive security to simplify operations and detect and remediate threats while delivering the best user experience.”

A New Intelligence-Driven Digital Workspace

Intelligence is the building block of a smart, automated and secure enterprise. Until now, organizations have struggled to gain visibility across all end users, devices and applications as the data is spread across many systems and tools. This lack of visibility contributes to poor user experience, greater operational costs and a lack of proper security controls.

Now generally available worldwide, Workspace ONE Intelligence, a new cloud-based service integrated with the Workspace ONE platform, uniquely combines aggregation and correlation of users, apps, networks and endpoints data. It features a decision engine that leverages the data to provide actionable recommendations and automation. This intelligent digital workspace can improve employee experience by allowing IT to identify and proactively fix issues before they impact productivity, set employee-friendly access policies, and provide a consistent user experience across devices and platforms while helping mitigate security issues at scale.

Specific capabilities of Workspace ONE Intelligence include:

• Integrated Insights bring together actionable information and recommendations for the entire digital workspace across all endpoints, apps, networks and user experience into one comprehensive view. Integrated insights pinpoint what’s working and what’s not in the environment, including monitoring application performance, and offer tangible recommendations that IT and development can easily act on.

• Insights-Driven Automation powered by a Decision Engine helps customers automate remediation rapidly across their entire digital workspace. Gone are the days of analyzing multiple timely decisions across several stand-alone tools. With the decision engine, IT can create rules to automate and optimize common tasks, such as remediating vulnerable Win 10 endpoints with a critical patch and setting conditional access controls to apps and services at the group or individual level. Automating alerts, notifications and remediation steps enable improved employee self-service to eliminate time spent on issues such as battery changes or answering helpdesk tickets that get in the way of employee productivity. With the decision engine, organizations can create rules to automate remediation across their entire environment including workflows with other third-party services like ServiceNow or Slack.

“We’ve deployed Workspace ONE across our school district, which consists of 48 schools serving more than 53,000 students, and have been very pleased with the results. We are excited to test Workspace ONE Intelligence in the future as the improvements in employee and student experience as well as strengthened data security have the potential to be significant for us,” said Brian Troudy, Director, Networking and Infrastructure, Corona-Norco Unified School District. “This new service will provide us with a way to automate security practices and give us access to metrics that will help us improve user experience for our teachers, administrators and students. That is a clear win-win for our staff and IT team.”

Connecting Security Silos to Improve Data Visibility and Provide a Predictive Security Approach

Security is the top priority for mobility and digital workplace investments in 2018¹ but there are too many stand-alone security tools burying data across multiple systems, limiting visibility and creating silos that perpetuate reactive, legacy security practices. The innovations announced today allow customers to connect their security technologies with Workspace ONE, giving them deeper insight and richer automation across their digital workspace.

When organizations are forced to manage endpoint remediation and access management with multiple disconnected solutions, visibility across the ecosystem is limited and vulnerabilities are bound to slip through the cracks. To address this challenge, today VMware launched the Workspace ONE Trust Network, a modern approach to digital workspace security that combines security capabilities inherently available in Workspace ONE with security capabilities of VMware’s new security partner network. By extending Workspace ONE Intelligence and its application programming interfaces (APIs), our security partners will be able to share and correlate threat data with Workspace ONE, to give our joint customers deeper insight and rich automation across their digital workspace.

Carbon Black, CrowdStrike, Cylance, Lookout, McAfee, Netskope and Symantec are the initial partners who will integrate their security solutions with Workspace ONE as part of the Workspace ONE Trust Network.

Workspace ONE AirLift Speeds and De-Risks Transition from Legacy to Modern Management for Windows 10

In order to deliver a successful digital workspace, organizations need to transition legacy Windows management models to a new modern approach. Workspace ONE offers the only unified endpoint management (UEM) platform with integrated Intelligence that supports all stages of the Windows 10 PC lifecycle – from onboarding to retirement – providing a modern approach for any management task. Now, VMware introduces Workspace ONE AirLift, enabling co-management of Windows 10 PCs alongside Microsoft System Center Configuration Management (SCCM). AirLift’s co-existence with SCCM allows customers to speed and de-risk transition efforts by easily migrating (i.e., “airlift”) PCLM tasks such as device onboarding, patching, software distribution and remote user support, to a more cost-efficient, secure and cloud-based modern management model. This enables organizations to move quickly to the new model without replacing SCCM or requiring costly PC and SCCM server upgrades.

Additional Workspace ONE innovations introduced today include:

·       Simplified Mac Adoption: The new Workspace ONE client for macOS delivers a consistent experience as employees switch between OS platforms. Using Workspace ONE, employees can access all apps from their macOS device, including virtual Windows apps.

·       Extended Security for O365 Apps: Workspace ONE now integrates the Microsoft Graph APIs to give IT O365-specific security features such as new Data Loss Prevention (DLP) controls, as well as continuous device risk monitoring that cuts off O365 access instantly if risk increases. Customers can enable vital business data is secure while increasing O365 adoption and delighting employees with simple access that bridges the gap between the O365 ecosystem and other work apps.

·       VMware Boxer with Intelligent Workflows Empower Employee Mobile Moments: New mobile flows surface context-based actions VMware Boxer secure email. This enables users to complete tasks across many business applications – such as Salesforce, Jira or Concur – without leaving the Boxer email app. In addition to out of the box business application connectors, our customers are also using this capability to customize our pre-built connectors with partner services or custom develop their own to help employees stay productive in the moment while in Boxer.

·       VMware Cloud on Azure VDI Beta: VMware today announced a beta for VMware virtual desktops with Azure infrastructure in partnership with Microsoft. Horizon Cloud on Azure VDI will expand upon VMware's support for published applications on Azure that was previously announced.