How Intel® EMA and SysTrack Help IT Create a Better Digital Experience for Remote Workers
Nearly 70% of workers globally work remotely at least once a month, according to a “2019 State of Remote Work” report from Owl Labs. While the remote workers surveyed reported feeling happier and more productive in their jobs, the study also found that around three quarters of remote employee managers cite IT support issues as an area of concern. How can organizations maintain the competitive edge of allowing employees to work remotely while also ensuring productivity and security aren’t undermined by technology?
The answer lies in restoring IT visibility and control over workers’ devices—whether employees are working onsite, remotely, or a combination of the two.
Announced today, Intel® Endpoint Management Assistant (Intel® EMA) is a solution created to facilitate remote manageability inside and outside of the corporate firewall.
Lakeside Software is offering day one support for Intel EMA, enabling SysTrack customers to seamlessly flow between monitoring a remote device to performing remote management within the Intel EMA interface.
What Is Intel EMA?
Intel EMA is a new solution to enable the Intel® vPro™ remote management platform that builds on the existing Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT) to support remote access either on-premises or in the cloud. Intel EMA consists of software for both the back-end server and the client. It enables out-of-band management so IT can manage devices when a host operating system is unresponsive or when in-band management isn’t enough. With support for RESTful APIs, Intel® EMA can be integrated into third-party platforms such as SysTrack.
“The modern workplace is more complex—more devices, more workers remote or on-the-go. The Intel vPro® platform is modernizing IT with more secure over-the-cloud management for devices both inside and outside the corporate firewall. Together with great partners, including Lakeside Software, we are tackling this complexity.”
Remote actions IT can take with Intel® EMA and Intel® AMT include the following:
- Power on a device
- Restart a device
- Set wake-up times and schedule updates
- Control a system even during an OS failure using keyboard-video-mouse (KVM)
- Repair devices at scale
To use Intel® EMA, systems must have current-generation Intel vPro® processors with Intel® AMT activated. Many device types are supported, including PCs, 2 in 1s, smart vending machines, ATMs, Intel® Unite conference room solutions, digital signage and more.
Four Ways to Improve Remote IT Using Intel EMA and SysTrack
SysTrack is a digital experience monitoring platform that captures over 10,000 data points every 15 seconds related to system performance and usage. Because SysTrack’s data is collected at the edge, information is captured regardless of whether an employee is working inside or outside of the corporate firewall, making it a natural companion to Intel® EMA.
At its core, SysTrack is designed to help IT understand and quantify employees’ digital experiences. With this insight, IT teams can align their actions with what will make the biggest difference to productivity and employee satisfaction. This is especially important for remote workers who may have differing expectations for what constitutes an excellent end-user experience and who are less likely to have access to in-person IT support.
“A modern organization’s greatest assets are its employees. As digital workspace trends have disrupted traditional business models, an understanding has emerged that the most significant source of competitive advantage for all businesses will come from their workforce’s ability to creatively exploit technology. To this end, employees must be provided with the digital tools and support required to be productive wherever and whenever they want to work,” said Rakshit Ghura, VP & Global Practice Head of Digital Workplace Services at HCL Technologies. “By combining the extensive endpoint analytics of Lakeside Software’s digital experience monitoring platform, SysTrack, with the remote management capabilities of the Intel Endpoint Management Assistant, organizations can maintain the insight and control they need to provide IT services outside of the corporate firewall. The SysTrack and Intel EMA integration is a fantastic solution for organizations wanting to allow employees to work remotely without sacrificing security or user experience.”
There are four primary ways that IT can use Intel EMA alongside SysTrack to support remote workers:
- Quickly troubleshoot and resolve issues: SysTrack facilitates root cause analysis through event correlation and AIOps to quickly surface both new and persistent problems. For instance, SysTrack can detect correlations between application crashes and the recent addition of an OS patch. Once the source of a problem is detected, Intel® EMA can help IT execute remote resolution.
- Monitor and improve device health without end-user involvement: SysTrack shows the current state of end-user experience and identifies sources of impact. IT can use this information to perform remote management when a user is not using their system, which could include restarting a system or applying software updates.
- Update the operating system without user disruption: With SysTrack, IT can see what OS version a system is running, how the OS is performing, and whether the system is ready for an upgrade. While the system is not actively being used, IT can use Intel® EMA to help power on the system so that an OS update can occur.
- Discover OS-level issues and remotely manage unresponsive systems: SysTrack helps IT identify machines with significant issues hindering end-user experience and potentially making a system unusable. Intel® AMT’s KVM features allows IT to control a problem system even during an OS failure, enabling severe issues to be resolved without requiring in-person support.
Watch the video below to see the integration in action.
For more information, read the Q&A from Mike Nordquist, Intel’s director of strategic planning and architecture in the business client group and Ben Murphy, Lakeside’s global director of product integrations.
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