Managing hundreds or thousands of endpoints is hard enough when they’re all located in the same office or campus. But when you have endpoints scattered across the world – as many global businesses do – you face an extra set of challenges when it comes to managing and patching them.

That’s why organizations that operate on a global scale must adopt some special practices to ensure not just that they can manage endpoints effectively, but also that they do so in ways that ensure a smooth experience for end-users. This article offers tips on how to achieve both goals.

The Challenges of Endpoint Management on a Global Scale

For businesses whose employees and offices are spread across multiple continents, effective endpoint management can prove especially challenging for several reasons:

• Time zones: End-users are distributed across multiple time zones, making it harder to ensure that IT staff don’t disrupt business operations when applying changes to a user’s workstation.
• Network performance: There is a risk of network performance issues when sending data across long geographic distances.
• Language barriers: The diverse languages spoken by end-users living in different countries or regions create an additional consideration for IT staff when managing endpoints across a global network.
• Compliance rules: The diversity of compliance rules across different jurisdictions adds another potential complicating factor in global endpoint management.

On top of these challenges, IT staff face all of the standard difficulties that come with endpoint management in any context, such as the need to support devices that run varying operating systems and to ensure that they provide the right software and support services to each employee or business unit.

Tips for Managing Endpoints Effectively Across the World

The following best practices can help global businesses mitigate these challenges.

1.    Monitor Language Packs

Keeping line-of-business applications up to date is a key aspect of endpoint management. But for global organizations, updating apps themselves isn’t enough. IT departments must also ensure that they keep language packs up to date.

This is important because language packs ensure that apps are available in the local language of each user group. Forgetting to redeploy a language pack when patching an application might break the language support for a particular user group. This risks not only disrupting business operations but also frustrating employees and making them feel marginalized by the company they work for.

2.    Align Management Operations With Timezones

Endpoint management operations, such as installing software updates or making operating system configuration, changes may require system downtime or reboots. For that reason, IT staff will ideally apply changes during non-working hours. For instance, you don’t want IT engineers in Europe to disrupt workflows for users based in California by installing a patch when it’s after-hours in Europe but in the middle of the workday in the Western U.S.

You also want to avoid making your IT staff work around the clock to accommodate the various time zones of your global offices.

Fortunately, the solution is relatively simple: Using automation and scheduling tools, IT departments can configure endpoint management operations to take place at different times, based on the time zones of the various employees or sites they’re supporting. This minimizes the risk of disruption to end-users, regardless of time zone differences or the periods during which IT staff are working.

3.    Leverage Caching

When you’re moving data across large geographic distances – as you might if IT staff based on one continent need to install a patch for endpoints on a different one, for instance – management operations will be much faster and more reliable if you take advantage of caching.

Caching means copying data once to a local region and then serving the copied version to multiple endpoints in that region. For instance, if IT staff based in Los Angeles need to distribute a patch to an office in Dublin, they could copy the patch to a data center near Dublin, and then copy it from there to the Dublin endpoints.

That way, instead of having to send hundreds of complete copies of the data between the U.S. and Ireland, they only have to perform a long-term transfer one time. As a result, the total time necessary to install the patch on each endpoint is likely to be lower, since network bandwidth and reliability are generally higher when operating across shorter geographic distances. The risk of failed patch attempts due to broken network connections is also lower.

Ultimately, caching helps ensure that end-users get the patches they need faster, with a lower risk of issues for IT teams to troubleshoot.

4.    Consider Local Priorities When Installing Updates

Sometimes, the urgency for delivering software patches to users in one country or region is higher than it is for those elsewhere. For example, if state-sponsored cyber attackers are targeting a specific country by attempting to exploit a known vulnerability, patching the vulnerability in the target country should take precedence over patching it elsewhere.

In scenarios like this, it’s important to establish dynamic patch urgency levels that align with localized risks and threats. If you can’t install updates across all endpoints on your global network at once – and most global businesses can’t due to the large scale on which they’re operating – you need the capacity to prioritize areas that matter most.

5.    Consider Local Compliance Mandates

Along similar lines, factoring in local or regional compliance rules can be important during endpoint management operations. Privacy laws like the GDPR might require certain disclosures or security protections to be in place when modifying configurations or installing patches, for example.

This is another reason why global organizations need a flexible, dynamic approach to endpoint management that allows them to tailor their operations for different regions and sets of users.

The bottom line: Endpoint management should deliver a smooth experience for end-users and IT teams alike. Although achieving these goals is inherently more challenging for global organizations, it’s possible when businesses take steps to address the special requirements of global endpoint management.