The smart way to manage apps on employee devices

Managing applications on employee devices at scale is complex and often associated with high costs, manual effort and skilled resources. As organisations grow, so too does the need to manage their applications, and ensure they are continuously up-to-date and compliant. 

Devices and applications are essential to every organisation. They are the tools that allow employees to communicate, automate tasks, collaborate, and perform their job. 

Installing an application on one device is one thing – anyone can do it. Open your PC or mobile, click install, enter your settings and you’re good to go. When you’re notified of an update, you click ‘update’. Done. 

But, what if you’re the IT pro tasked with installing multiple, sometimes complex, applications across multiple devices for multiple employees?  

How do you ensure everyone is using the same, up-to-date version and how do you stay ahead of any security vulnerabilities?  

And, that's just the security component.  

What happens when your IT service desk is overwhelmed with frustrated employees, who are having issues collaborating because everyone has different versions, or applications aren’t working full stop? Or even worse, what happens when you have hundreds of employee-installed applications out there in the wild, not visible, unpatched, and adding to your security risks? 

A classic example is companies that grow rapidly and then reach a tipping point where managing applications ad-hoc has become unmanageable. For some organisations, at this point, they’ll simply stop managing applications altogether. It is deemed “too hard” and, after all, business needs to go on. Other companies throw more money at the service desk, who literally go to each device, one by one, to check that applications are correctly installed, up-to-date and functional. However, this quickly becomes too expensive to maintain and, before long, application management is put in the “too hard” basket for them as well. 

At this point, application packaging becomes a no-brainer. 

In short, application packaging enables your IT team to send applications to employee devices over a trusted network—saving employees from manually doing it themselves. Without having to spend time installing and configuring numerous applications, employees can focus on the work they’re primed to do. 

Packaging alone doesn’t cut it 

While application packaging is a faster and smarter way to manage applications on employee devices, it is not a silver bullet solution. 

I recently met a senior IT professional who told me he spends up to two days every week packaging applications for his organisation of 100 employees.  

Why?  

Because hiring an external consultant was too expensive. Some applications, particularly the more complex ones, take up to three days each to package. And when an update becomes available, he needs to repackage it all over again. It’s no wonder so many IT teams stop packaging applications altogether.  

Other companies try application packaging services. These can be great for packaging standard applications and ensuring the applications are kept up to date. 

However, this can fall short when it comes to customising applications for a specific organisation and when applications are more complex. A lot of these services cannot package industry-specific or internally-built applications, which are often most critical to the organisation.  

There’s no doubting the complexities around application management, and while packaging fixes part of the problem, there’s more to successfully managing applications at scale than just packaging them. 

The power of automation 

Automating application management, including the packaging, overcomes the security, compliance and productivity barriers that packaging alone cannot.  

I’ve always been amazed by the amount of time IT and security professionals spend on managing applications—particularly when I know their time could be better spent elsewhere.  

Where automation makes sense, it should be fully utilised, especially if it means your IT team and employees can invest their expertise into more meaningful projects.  

This is one of the fundamental ideals that underpin the Devicie philosophy.  

Devicie automates application management at scale, enabling organisations to overcome what has traditionally been a major IT bottleneck. 

Automating application packaging and patch management ensures your end-user applications are always up to date mitigating the threat from unpatched vulnerabilities.