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Organisations are grappling with the demands of an increasingly digital workforce. Devices, a cloud-native device management company, says it has the answer.

Founded by Martin McGregor, who has worked in the IT industry for 25 years, Devices aims to help organisations deploy, manage, and secure their ever-growing fleets of digital devices. In an interview, McGregor explained that a changing threat environment and shifting ways of working inspired the creation of the company.

"I was helping particularly large organisations deal with devices at scale — organisations with typically hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of end user devices," he said. "The state of that industry before we started Devices was that there wasn't a lot of change in the technology that people like myself could use to solve these problems."

Cyber crime is at the heart of the challenge. According to McGregor, end user devices are a major vulnerability for enterprises, with patch management and privilege control often too difficult to handle reliably. "They're a target for ransomware and phishing campaigns, and still the majority of cyber attacks originate that way," he said.

The rise of remote work has only intensified the problem. "Organisations now just really have to be able to support people that are working remotely… you need to be able to manage these devices and provision these devices in a way that works natively on the internet," McGregor stated.

Devices' own solution was born from the belief that existing tools fell short. "The rest of the market are tools IT people can use to build their own projects, their own solutions to start managing devices," McGregor explained. "What's a little bit different about Device is that everything that we do is about facilitating a company getting to a great outcome with their devices. That means that organisation doesn't need to manage their own projects, build their own infrastructure. Those are all provided to the customer as a service by Devices."

According to McGregor, this approach can save companies long and costly roll-out programmes. "We save a 9 to 18 month long project for them to set up and make all of this stuff available to the organisation. It only takes us a couple of hours to get to that place but then we're able to get security outcomes that are just very difficult to try and achieve without the high degree of automation that we've built into our platform," he noted.

The ongoing shift to hybrid and home-based work presents unique challenges for device management — challenges many companies remain unprepared for. "A lot of people would be surprised that the technology is still really geared towards the traditional office setting," McGregor said. He described how the status quo often involves a laborious supply chain, with devices physically handled by IT teams before being shipped to end users.

"Depending on people to do repetitive tasks like that doesn't get you consistent outcomes to the same degree that automation does," he said. Devices, by contrast, allows for remote, over-the-internet deployment and management. "Devices deploys all of the devices for our customers over the Internet so no one has to touch them," McGregor explained. "You can ship an end user device, they can pull it out of the box, put in their credentials, and then Device builds the system from the ground up. We apply hundreds of security controls, we install their apps, and we manage that device then going forward for them as well."

Asked about the future, McGregor said the company has plans to broaden its offering to smaller businesses. "At the moment you know we were birthed in the enterprise, we were helping large organisations deal with these issues at scale for a long time, so our product is definitely an enterprise sort of grade product and our customers are typically larger. As we continue to develop our product, it means that we can make it available to smaller and smaller organisations," he explained.

"Our ambition is to be able to… one day be able to service a company of two or three employees when they start up. At the moment… our customers have between 250 to 10,000 employees. But that should change."

Despite these future ambitions, Devices' focus remains on delivering seamless device management for customers today. "Everything that we do is about facilitating a company getting to a great outcome with their devices," emphasised McGregor.

With cyber threats on the rise and the workforce now more distributed than ever, the task of safeguarding devices has moved beyond an IT afterthought to business critical. As McGregor put it, "End user devices are really an open spot, or an open wound, for organisations struggling to do patching, manage privilege, and things like that."

He concluded, "I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about what we're doing. Ultimately, we want to make it easy for organisations of any size to secure and manage their devices — wherever their people are."