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What the self-healing PC can mean for IT

Stephanie_Hallford
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The pandemic has disrupted almost every aspect of our lives this year, including the way we work: we are increasingly working outside of the office, and relying on home networks and laptops. For many, this new paradigm is here to stay — 74% of companies are planning to shift some employees to remote work permanently.1 While this shift to remote work is not totally new, the pandemic has accelerated the change. As we try our best to adapt, our most important ally in navigating this new normal literally sits right in front of us: the PC.

Employees are not the only ones who find themselves adapting. IT departments are working hard to evolve the way they manage technology to accommodate the increase in remote workers. Successful IT teams have been listening to their remote workers, providing a variety of devices and operating systems to help reduce day-to-day tech frustrations. This adds another level of complexity to adaptations already being made for the move to the cloud.

With this complexity, IT departments can no longer afford to be reactive and manual in maintaining this growing network of remote workers. The right tools and partners can help. Cloud-based management can provide insight into a disparate workforce, and automation can help root out issues before they disrupt work. Advanced telemetry, with the aid of AI and machine learning, can help strengthen security and overall workforce manageability.

Remote work trends:

  • 77% of workers prefer laptops over phones on-the-go2

  • 80% of millennials take jobs based on workplace tech3

  • 42% of millennials would quit over tech4


At Intel, our research and development team is working to enable this workplace of the future through innovation driven by the end user experience. These innovations include all-day battery life, always-on capabilities, enhanced connectivity, and our vision of the self-healing PC. The idea is simple: the self-healing PC can predict and prevent IT issues without disrupting the user. What if IT could identify and replace malfunctioning hardware before it fails? What if IT could curb performance issues before the user notices? The smoothest end user experience is one invisible to the user, with potential problems identified and resolved by the PC. The end user remains happily unaware of these issues, and isn’t generating tickets for IT. This use of telemetry to solve everyday user frustration is a very exciting development.

At Intel, IT is integrated into — and shapes — every aspect of the employee experience. It’s part of our charter. We’ve created “persona-driven experiences” for personal workspace and technology needs. This ensures that each employee has the right products and solutions for their best performance and productivity — not just at this moment, but into the future, as IT proactively keeps them up to date and optimized.

Recently, we have heavily invested in new programs and platforms at Intel in order to support our vision of the self-healing PC. Project Athena focuses on innovative PC technologies driven by the end user’s experience and requirements, with our engineers exploring ideas around all-day battery life, always-on capabilities, and enhanced connectivity. The Intel® Evo™ platform brings those ideas to life in sleek, exciting laptops co-designed with our OEM partners. The Intel vPro® platform helps us provide seamless business PC experiences by providing IT tools like remote manageability and hardware-enhanced security, while delivering the premium performance and stability that end users expect. We’re also partnering with companies to provide software solutions fully optimized for these capabilities.

For employers and IT teams, having a majority-remote workforce is the new reality. This sea change has been challenging for everyone, and IT teams will need technology that helps them be predictive and proactive as they continue to best serve their end users. We see the self-healing PC and automated remediation as being key in helping IT achieve this, and that takes both software and hardware working together. We will continue collaborating with key partners to bring the best technologies together. In addition to our R&D push, we’re working on fostering new opportunities to bring enterprise solutions to market in 2021 to keep business users — whether remote, in the office, or on the go — happy, productive, and performing at their best.

Sources:
1 Gartner, Gartner CFO Survey Reveals 74% Intend to Shift Some Employees to Remote Work Permanently, April 2020
2Remote.co, 17 Stats About Remote Work in 2020, August 2019
3ZDNet, Millennials at work: Tech is more important than free lunch and ping pong, July 2016
4Intel Mobile Go-Getter Attitudes Study Q2’19. Base: US+PRC: Mobile Go-Getters: n=549
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About the Author
Stephanie Hallford is vice president in the Client Computing Group and general manager of Business Client Platforms at Intel Corporation.