The cloud clearly has the potential to change the way almost every aspect of IT is managed. Realizing that potential, however, has proven to be something of a challenge over the last few years as the large number of mobile computing devices and cloud services proliferated across the enterprise.
Today, the venture capital firms that own LANDESK and HEAT Software announced the two companies will be merged to create a still unnamed entity dedicated to building a cloud service that will simplify the management of both endpoints and services across the enterprise. LANDESK CEO Steve Daly says the new name of the company will be revealed later this month, with the first new product offerings expected to follow shortly in the months ahead.
In the meantime, Daly says the issue confronting IT organizations today is that different systems and processes are used to manage and provision PCs, smartphones and cloud services. The new corporate entity arising from the merger of LANDESK and HEAT Software will employ the cloud platform created by HEAT Software to unify the management of endpoints and IT security, says Daly.
“The way all those processes get managed today is very fragmented,” says Daly.
That fragmentation, adds Daly, winds up creating gaps that lead to more risk being introduced into the IT environment because it’s easy to miss, for example, the need to de-provision access to a cloud service such as Salesforce whenever an employee leaves a company.
As different styles of computing have taken hold in the enterprise, IT organizations and vendors alike have found themselves playing catchup from a management perspective in ways that introduce additional levels of complexity. The start of a New Year would appear to be as good a time as any to focus on eliminating that complexity once and for all.