Making Zero Touch Enrollment Across Platforms A Reality

As an organization grows, so does its IT footprint. To manage and troubleshoot endpoint issues, every enterprise has its own trusted team of System Administrators who usually juggle various tasks such as deploying operating systems, managing and baselining assets, reporting on endpoints, and much more. But as issues keep mounting, so does the pressure on the IT resource management team. Once simple tasks like this scale, they can cause critical issues to slip through the radar. 

An increasing IT resource footprint and a stretched IT team invariably lead to challenges in maintaining continuous compliance. 

Manual provisioning of new laptops or desktops for new employees is quite expensive.  It typically involves ISO images and a whole lot of wasted time.

It can take hours to set up the machine, leading to a loss in employee productivity.

Zero-Touch Provisioning is the Goal for all IT Teams 

And that’s because it saves hundreds of hours of effort. In addition, it leads to a better end-user experience and reduces the opportunity for configuration errors.   

Consider this scenario: 

Your procurement organization, working with authorized resellers, ships devices directly to employees. Once the laptop is plugged into the network and turned on, it checks its serial number against a known list of MDM servers. Your company portal then points each device to the appropriate modern client management server. Once that communication path is established, the laptop or machine can leverage MDM APIs, policies, payloads and actions to configure the target device completely. 

Once configured, the end user will start seeing new applications installed. Essential software like the AV and VPN software, firewall settings, password settings, auto screen lock settings, disk encryption are all configured. After that, the end-user has nothing else to do but get productive! 

Challenges with Managing Desktops on Different Operating Systems

The scenario above is utopian given the challenges IT Sysadmins face. These include: 

• Multiple tools to manage machines on different operating systems 
• A lack of visibility into fleet status in real time across device types 
• The inability to readily take action on compliance drifts from a single console 
• Desktops or laptops not in close proximity to the IT team responsible for maintaining continuous device compliance  

Powering Employee Productivity and Continuous Compliance with Chef Desktop 

Chef Desktop enables organizations to apply a consistent approach to automate the deployment, management and continuous compliance to their IT resources like laptops, desktops, and kiosk workstations from a centralized location. Gain visibility into the health of your entire fleet from a single pane of glass on a range of operating systems (macOS, Windows, Linux). 

Chef Desktop provides IT resource managers with the ability to: 

• Apply consistent, flexible policy-driven configuration to their entire fleet 
• Eliminate time-consuming manual processes, and reduce costs 
• Maintain visibility into fleet-wide status and compliance 
• Audit and remediate against industry standards (CIS/DISA-STIGs) 
• Gain deep visibility into their desktop fleet from a comprehensive dashboard 
• Enhance efficiency and productivity with automation and time-saving processes 

Chef Desktop is Different From What’s Available Today 

 Most practitioners would ask, “How is this any different from a host of similar offerings?” The answer to that question is simple: 

• Chef Desktop is perhaps the only offering that enables enterprises to manage desktops, laptops or kiosks across Windows, macOS, or Linux systems. 
• We implement the principles of the Coded Enterprise with Chef Desktop. Everything runs as code, allowing for change control and streamlined automation. 
• Chef Desktop is extensible with third-party apps or custom tooling. Feel comfortable using Chef Desktop with either Munki or Gorilla, for example, to manage your apps.  
• Audits are easily enabled with Chef Desktop. IT teams spending weeks getting access to and identifying non-compliant machines are a thing of the past. 
• Chef Desktop makes remediation of any compliance variance or configuration drift a breeze.  

Join Our Webinar to Learn More 

All this is just a taste of what we have in store for you. Register now for our webinar on August 25, 2021 at 9:00 AM PT. 

Our webinar hosts, Sudeep Charles, Senior Manager, Product Marketing and Nischal Reddy, Senior Product Manager at Chef, will showcase current trends and challenges in zero-touch enrollment across platforms and how you can circumvent them with Chef Desktop. Don’t forget to get your questions ready for the Q&A session. 

Book your spot now!