Within this upside-down world, enterprises face new issues.

Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, the country’s entire workforce, save for essential employees, went remote in the blink of an eye.

Within this upside-down world, enterprises face new issues. Among them, their corporate VPNs are getting hammered, and network management and security has become even more complex for IT teams stretched thin and operating under tremendous strain.

While enterprise leaders know that COVID-19 will eventually end, few believe that work will ever go completely back to “normal.” Between the establishment of new remote work habits and the fear that another unforeseen crisis could send their entire workforce home again, companies are formulating strategies to protect their networks, operations and employees.

To get past the immediate hurdles, enterprises are adopting sophisticated content distribution engines. A number of solutions are on the market that use automation to offload management tasks and reduce security risks. But, automation is not always enough to solve bandwidth, scalability and reliability issues.

One approach that is rapidly gaining popularity is peer-to-peer content distribution. It differs from traditional methods by requiring IT to download a piece of software or a patch only one time, and that single version can then be shared across the entire network at once versus requiring each individual machine to download the software. That kind of speed and scalability pays big dividends when you think about the difference in bandwidth required to send an update to 30,000 machines over a VPN. The network impact is enormous. As such, content can be successfully deployed in a timely manner without compromising network performance or impeding business operations.

Today’s uncertainty has reprioritized it, though. Enterprises want to eliminate the costs associated with maintaining on-premise environments. They also want access to better systems management platforms that allow uniform endpoint management and the means to unify disparate systems, particularly when people are outside of the corporate network and when employees need to connect remotely. MDM has promised all of this and more.

With new content distribution engines debuting to serve MDM environments efficiently, enterprises can finally dust off MDM plans long set aside. The network challenges highlighted throughout the pandemic, coupled with new technology that solves scalability and reliability issues, will likely prompt organizations to move forward with their digital transformation. It won’t happen overnight because digital transformation is a massive undertaking — converting thousands of machines and devices — and companies already have a lot to contend with due to COVID-19. But MDM will become a priority in the days to come — if nothing else than as a protective mechanism for the next global crisis.