Walking into the office of an executive in a large, global corporation, you are likely to find multiple screens connected to an advanced enterprise desktop environment, a smartphone also hooked into the company’s IT infrastructure, and a laptop giving the executive full connectivity to the apps and data she needs when outside the office.
This is very different from what you might have found walking into a similar executive’s office back in the early 1990s. Instead of a laptop and smartphone, there would have been filing cabinets full of paper. Computers were optional, and the phone plugged into a socket in the wall would have been just that and nothing more. If there were a screen on the desk, it would have been connected to a computer underneath, which was in turn connected to a server in a rack room somewhere in a dark corner of the building.
To get from that tech-minimalist environment in the early 1990s to the ultra-connected, technology-driven world we live and work in today, we needed (among other things) an IT process we now call endpoint management. The technology that facilitated that process for a huge number of enterprise organisations was (and often still is) SCCM – System Center Configuration Manager.
SCCM: The Endpoint Management Titan
The titan of endpoint management, to borrow a metaphor from Greek mythology, is SCCM. Just like the Titans are the first generation of gods in Greek mythology, SCCM is the first generation of endpoint management in modern IT.
The connection with Greek mythology doesn’t end there, as we are all currently observing (and playing a bit part in) a saga that resembles the downfall of the Titans. In Greek mythology, the Olympian gods, led by Zeus, overthrow the Titans, with Zeus becoming the new ruler of the cosmos.
In endpoint management, Intune is Zeus, with Microsoft pushing for Intune to become the new ruler of the endpoint management cosmos. More on that later.
How SCCM Became the Enterprise Default for Endpoint Management
We’ll leave the Greek mythology metaphors there to get on with looking at how SCCM became the enterprise default for managing large estates of computers and application deployments. Understanding this helps explain why SCCM still exists (under its current moniker, ConfigMgr) and why organisations are happy to continue using it. Here are the headlines:
- Historical momentum – tracing its roots back to 1994, SCCM got a significant head start on its competitors in the enterprise management space.
- Continuous evolution – over three decades, SCCM has evolved to keep pace with the IT, management, and compliance needs of enterprise organisations.
- Deep Windows integration – SCCM was built for Windows and also now has tight integration with Active Directory.
- Comprehensive feature set – throughout each iteration of SCCM, it has delivered on the needs of enterprise organisations. Key principles include centralised management, management across the full endpoint lifecycle, advanced automation, and comprehensive reporting.
- Vendor and community support – Microsoft provides extensive support and documentation for SCCM, plus there is a large community of IT professionals in the SCCM ecosystem.
The On-Premises Endpoint Management Solution
Ultimately, SCCM enables the central control of machines across the whole company. This makes operations teams more efficient and helps create standards, reducing support overheads. The aim of SCCM is to control the desktop and its health with all devices in the organisation managed in a stable operating environment.
One feature we haven’t touched on with SCCM yet is the fact it is all on-premises. This means you need on-premises infrastructure and servers to operate it. The more desktops and devices you have, the more infrastructure and servers you require. If you have geographically disparate teams and business units, you also need a greater number of tiers for content replication to your various sites.
The Cloud Alternative
Desktops are only one type of device used in modern enterprise organisations. Not only are there a multitude of other physical devices that require management (security, application deployment, access control, etc), but there are also virtual devices.
Enter Intune, Microsoft’s newer, younger, and better-looking endpoint management tool. Intune is endpoint management in the cloud, so it doesn’t require on-premises infrastructure or servers. It also manages all types of endpoints equally and without prejudice, making it a unified endpoint management platform.
Have enterprise organisations switched en masse to this new endpoint management kid on the block? Some have, but an awful lot haven’t as yet, choosing instead to stick with SCCM, not least because it is so embedded in the organisation. Microsoft adapted to this lingering enterprise preference for SCCM by making it possible to install the SCCM (ConfigMgr) client (which must be installed on all devices) on VDI endpoints, including Windows 365 Cloud PCs.
This cemented the trend of enterprise organisations sticking with SCCM until they have a big enough VDI infrastructure for it to make sense to switch to a cloud-based endpoint management solution.
So, for many organisations, it’s business as usual in terms of endpoint management, with “usual” equalling SCCM. Change is in the air, however, with the ongoing rise of Intune.
Find out more in our whitepaper, An IT Professional’s Handbook to Endpoint Management. In the whitepaper, we explore the history of endpoint management and the rise of Intune as it becomes the de facto endpoint management solution for enterprises. We also outline the steps involved in migrating from SCCM to Intune, with a case study that shows how such a migration can be successfully and cost-effectively achieved.
