How many remote endpoints does your IT team have to manage? When you have a remote workforce, employee-owned devices enrolled for management, or multiple locations to support, managing a distributed environment can be challenging. Without the right management tools, your IT teams can struggle with patch lag, inconsistent policy enforcement, limited visibility, and other challenges that can jeopardize both efficiency and security.
Fortunately, this can be addressed with the right autonomous endpoint management software. Automated tools can help IT teams keep up with the volume and velocity of patches and updates, manage distributed environments, and improve their time to remediation, provided they have the right features.
With that in mind, let’s explore the core features of autonomous endpoint management, why they matter, and how to evaluate them during trials. From there, you can evaluate tools consistently and choose the best fit for your organization.
What Makes Endpoint Management “Autonomous” In Practice?
Autonomous endpoint management goes beyond scheduled patching. Autonomy is a combination of continuous visibility, policy-driven automation, and self-remediation, with human-approved guardrails to keep actions controlled.
“Autonomous” typically includes:
Continuous endpoint monitoring and inventory updates.
Automated gap detection, including missing patches, risky apps, and security misconfigurations.
Policy-based remediation, including what happens, when, and to which devices.
Verification and evidence to prove that changes are properly implemented
Which Patch And Vulnerability Features Are Non-Negotiable?
When evaluating solutions, you’ll want to make sure you pick one that meets these criteria:
1. Can It Patch Both OS and Third-Party Apps Reliably?
Automated patching is important for ensuring that all endpoints are up to date and secure. However, some patching solutions only focus on certain operating systems. You need a tool that can cover the operating systems in your environment and the third-party apps your users rely on, so you can reduce patch lag and avoid preventable exposure from missed updates.
A strong endpoint management solution can deploy patches across endpoints with a steady cadence and reliable patch status tracking. During evaluation, confirm the exact OS coverage and third-party catalog in a trial so there are no surprises later. This includes handling different app versions and patches, verifying patches and remediating failures, and implementing controls to bring offline devices back into patch compliance when they reconnect.
2. Does It Provide CVE-Level Risk Context and Prioritization?
Common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) are known and documented threats that businesses should be able to defend against. A good autonomous endpoint management solution includes CVE-based visibility and the ability to prioritize remediation based on risk signals such as severity, exposure scope, and known exploitation.
Additionally, good automation tools can use targeted deployments to address known and detected threats. This can improve response time and reduce the window of exposure by turning prioritization into targeted remediation, without relying on manual follow-up for every device.
3. Are Rollouts Safe And Controlled?
Patch deployment should be a controlled process, rather than updating every device randomly or at once. Good endpoint management tools use ring-based patch deployment, starting with a small pilot group of devices and rolling out the update in phases to ensure every endpoint is properly updated and any issues are addressed.
This should also include robust controls for patch deployments, including the ability to set and manage maintenance windows, enable reboot controls, and define deferral rules for delaying a patch. Additionally, a patch management solution should support mitigation workflows for those cases when an update causes issues.
How Does The Tool Deliver Continuous Endpoint Visibility?
In addition to patch management, endpoint visibility is essential for properly managing and supporting remote devices. IT teams need to be able to tell at a glance how many endpoints are connected, their patch and configuration status, what software is installed, and where gaps exist. That makes continuous visibility a non-negotiable.
1. What Inventory Depth Do You Actually Get?
Endpoint visibility starts with a clear, organized inventory. This should include both hardware (device models, storage, and OS build) and software (apps, versions, and the last time they were online) to provide a comprehensive view of a business’s environment. Additionally, the inventory should track changes over time, including both what changed and when, to identify points of failure or suspicious activities.
2. Can You See Real Operational Status, Not Just Snapshots?
Inventory should include up-to-the-minute statuses, including online vs. offline status and the last time each device checked in. If your visibility only captures a moment in time every now and then, you’re not seeing the latest and most accurate information. This should include patch compliance (sorted by device group, OS, application, and/or time window) as well as how exceptions are handled for devices that can’t be patched or need additional approvals.
What Automation Capabilities Matter Most, And What Guardrails Prevent Damage?
Not all solutions offer the same automation capabilities, so it’s essential to find one with the tools you need, as well as guardrails to keep automation in line and safe. With that in mind, ask these questions when looking at endpoint management tools:
1. What Can Be Automated End-to-End?
Consider what can be automated and how much of the workflow it impacts. For threat detection and management, for instance, it should encompass detection, remediation, and workflow verification.
You’ll also want to look at trigger-based automation that activates once certain conditions are met. For instance, if the endpoint management solution detects that a critical patch is missing, that should trigger a condition to activate the patching process.
This will enable remediation at scale without flooding IT teams with support tickets.
2. What Controls Keep Automation Safe?
As useful as automation is, unchecked automation is also risky. As such, autonomous endpoint management solutions should include controls and guardrails to keep automation within approved boundaries.
This includes approval gates for sensitive actions and scoped policies for different groups, devices, and roles, and audit trails for every automated action. These features help keep the automation actions transparent and include checks to ensure humans still have a hand in approving important actions.
What Reporting And Evidence Do You Need To Prove Results?
When you’re getting audited, you want to be able to pull reports and information quickly. As such, you’ll want a platform that provides robust reporting and clear records of activities, not just vanity dashboards. These reports can also help you track improvement over time, such as faster remediation and reduced exposure windows.
Look for reports that include:
Patch compliance over time (including trends, rather than just the current state).
CVE exposure views, sorted by endpoint group.
Deployment history and successes or failures, along with the reasons behind any failures.
Export options, including scheduled deliveries for stakeholders.
Will It Fit Your Stack And Scale Without Adding More Complexity?
Your endpoint management solution should integrate with the systems you already use and avoid creating additional manual steps. If it has trouble connecting and working with existing tools, that will only add further complications and make life harder for IT agents, rather than making their work easier.
Consider the following when looking at autonomous endpoint management software:
1. Integrations That Reduce Manual Work
The goal of automation and integrations is to reduce the manual work IT agents have to manage each day. As such, you’ll want to look for integrations with features that streamline work and improve efficiency, including identity and access features (such as role-based access control and least privilege), ITSM or ticketing triggers, and features that align with and complement your existing security tools.
2. Deployment And Ongoing Management
When you add a new solution to your tech stack, it should be easy to deploy and manage. Look for a solution with a lightweight rollout and fast time-to-value, deployable with minimal disruption. You’ll also want to consider your remote and distributed workforces, including bandwidth, time zones, and off-network devices, to make sure it can be properly deployed everywhere.
What Should You Test During A Trial Or Demo?
Trials and demonstrations are the best way to get a hands-on experience with any solutions you’re considering. However, these trials should be thorough tests to ensure the endpoint management solution meets all your needs, rather than just being “good enough” or effective in a very generic environment.
Be sure to test the following during a demo:
Import or discover a representative device set, including mixed operating systems, remote devices, and on-site devices.
Confirm software inventory is accurate for a handful of endpoints and spot-check versions.
Identify a small set of missing third-party updates and deploy them in phases to test rollouts.
Test reboot handling and user deferral behavior.
Pick one high-risk CVE scenario and confirm you can find affected endpoints, deploy remediation, and verify closure.
Simulate an offline endpoint and see how it catches up and reports its status after going online.
Generate a compliance or patch-evidence report that shows change history and outcomes.
Review audit logs and role permissions to confirm safe automation governance.
How Splashtop AEM Supports These Autonomous Endpoint Management Needs
If you are evaluating tools against the criteria above, Splashtop AEM is one option designed to support real-time patching and endpoint visibility with policy-driven automation. It helps IT teams manage and remediate across distributed endpoints from a centralized console.
With Splashtop AEM, IT teams can maintain up-to-date inventory and visibility across connected endpoints. It provides CVE-based vulnerability insights and alerting, along with automated patch management and remediation workflows, helping teams prioritize fixes and verify outcomes with less manual effort.
Splashtop AEM provides:
CVE-based vulnerability insights across endpoints, with prioritization and actionable information.
Real-time patching and automated, ring-based deployments to reduce manual effort while ensuring an efficient rollout across devices and groups.
Hardware and software inventory and visibility.
Automation and policy controls that support repeatable, auditable workflows.
Get Started with Splashtop AEM
When evaluating autonomous endpoint management software, you need to look beyond the label and see how it performs as a workflow. Consider each step, from visibility to decisions and action to verification, to ensure every step has the right combination of automation, guardrails, and human approval to maintain both efficiency and security.
With the right automation tools, like Splashtop AEM, you can reduce manual effort, improve consistency, and shorten exposure windows by identifying issues faster and remediating them at scale. This helps maintain IT compliance and support remote employees, all without adding to IT teams' burdens.
Ready to evaluate Splashtop AEM against your checklist? Start a free trial!
