For years, a creeping digital transformation, characterized by the here-and-there incorporation of new tools and services, has been visible in many schools. But recently, K-12 administrators were forced to fast-track these efforts to engage and support dispersed students, indefinitely.
For schools working to keep pace in a rapidly changing world and managing devices across locations, Intel’s vPro platform delivers new levels of performance, remote management, security, and stability. Intel® Solution Architect Bryon Wirtz explained how vPro helps users seamlessly leverage technology in the modern school.
What advantage does Intel’s vPro education platform hold over other platforms?
Today’s educational workloads—like anywhere learning, video streaming, and remote collaboration—put enormous demands on devices and create a larger need for a seamless compute experience. We focus on creating that experience in a reliable, secure, and stable way.
If a system component isn’t working during a remote-learning session, classroom management and user experience are impacted quickly. It’s extremely important that everything work together as a cohesive system. We’re a component supplier for these systems, but we realize it’s more than that. We know that the entire device ecosystem must function. As the system “core,” vPro is uniquely positioned to unify everything and create real value. We’re like the glue that pulls it all together.
The 4 tenants of the vPro platform are performance, manageability, security, and stability. Let’s start with performance. How does Intel vPro® help K-12 educational performance?
When you think about traditional performance, processor speed, one of the emerging workloads we’ve looked at is breakout rooms. When a teacher assigns students to groups, depending on the hardware, it can take a few seconds or up to half a minute to join a session. This has a huge impact on the user experience. With vPro, we’ve pre-selected our best-performing processors, creating a filter. Now, school decision-makers don’t need to worry about performance—the pre-filter guarantees it.
Additionally, we talk often about connectivity. Especially in this hybrid-learning environment, consistent, reliable connectivity is critical. vPro devices include Intel’s Wi-Fi card, offering up to 3X faster bandwidth. It’s another system advantage, ensuring that conferencing sessions run smoothly, students can access content, and teachers can deliver lessons consistently.
How does vPro affect battery life?
This is where Intel’s architecture plays a real advantage. We know that devices need to last all day. vPro devices are designed to ramp up during a demanding task. Once it’s completed, the device returns to an idle state to conserve battery life, seamlessly delivering lasting performance.
Does Intel’s Thunderbolt™ Technology play a role here?
Definitely. When you consider peripherals, Thunderbolt is the premier technology. With a single port for all peripherals, users achieve 8X more total bandwidth, enabling richer content and faster data transfers. This simplified interface results in less breakage, faster performance, and a better user experience.
Considering manageability, how does the vPro serve the K-12 environment uniquely?
Most K-12 communities are geographically dispersed. IT staff can spend a lot of time traveling to repair devices. With Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT), they don’t have to. AMT is vPro’s secret sauce, enabling IT staff to administer to a device at the hardware level, anywhere. Because it’s hardware-based, you don’t need an agent running on the device or a healthy operating system. IT administrators can remotely manage to discover, monitor, repair, restore, and help protect networked devices.
Additionally, our cloud-based Endpoint Management Assistant (EMA) enables this both inside and outside the school firewall, even when out of band. So, if a user is connected to their home Wi-Fi and a device has crashed, using AMT, an IT administrator can access it and maintain a connection with EMA.
Amid growing threats, how is Intel® addressing security to help education environments?
Intel has a security-first pledge, and we view security in 3 ways: above, in, and below the operating system. Above the operating system includes a suite of hardware-assisted technologies, including APIs, hooks, and our Control-Flow Enforcement Technology, to enhance existing antimalware solutions and detect cyberthreats. Similarly, in the operating system, Intel® virtualization technology enables a variety of OS security services to ensure that assets are protected and threats are detected. Below the operating system, architectural features, like memory encryption and BIOS protection, help minimize application-performance concerns and reduce the threat footprint. From hardware through applications, these resilient, forward-thinking devices are built to shut down threats before they happen.
The last tenant is stability. How does Intel address this, and why is it important?
First, there’s validation. vPro is a platform, and through our Stable Image Platform Program (SIPP), we certify that all devices support current and emerging technologies before they hit the market. Without that validation comes frequent updates or crashes, resulting in IT costs, either in break-fix or additional patches. We do that work upfront, so customers don’t have to.
Secondly, once a system is available, changes at a component level are not allowed for 15 months after launch. The reason for this is that if you introduce a new component into a system, there’s new firmware and, potentially, new BIOS settings or interactions that cause instability. Once a device is imaged, we ensure that each subsequent roll-out is the same, promising a stable, consistent experience.
When you look at the total cost of ownership (TCO), the Intel vPro® platform offers savings. Address where these come from.
A study found that vPro devices add nominal upfront costs compared with non-vPro counterparts. But throughout a typical device lifecycle, most expenses are maintenance-related. If there’s a performance issue, more help desk calls consume resources. If remote devices need to be brought on-site for repair, this results in lost time and efficiency. Those are just a couple of examples, but generally, maintenance costs overwhelm hardware costs.
vPro’s purpose to reduce maintenance also reduces the TCO. vPro devices work better initially because they’re right-sized. Long-term, their enhanced performance and stability free up IT staff to focus on strategic initiatives to affect organizations at a higher level.
In closing, share your top reasons why Intel vPro® is best for the K-12 education environment.
With vPro, Intel set out to develop a platform that stays out of the way. In an education environment, learning—not technology—should be the focus. This starts with a right-sized device that operates seamlessly and avoids issues.
Remote manageability is crucial. For an IT administrator to reach a device anywhere, even when its operating system or applications are unresponsive, is hugely beneficial and can reduce the TCO significantly. Then, there’s security. Having a secure foundation from the start helps shore up devices across entire systems.
Ultimately, what the vPro platform does is empowers users to focus solely on the business of education, rather than worrying whether the technology will perform.
With Intel’s integrated vPro, school communities can accelerate performance and reduce costs using the latest PC technologies in one, validated solution. To fully leverage this technology and accomplish more, expert partner UDT works with schools to design, build, and deploy Intel®-powered solutions to optimize digital learning and conserve resources through smart consumption and infrastructures.
As a technology firm uniting experiences and capabilities of different partners, UDT helps clients become enterprises of the future. Its endpoint solutions simplify device lifecycle management, so clients can focus on core objectives, while its digital transformation solutions continuously optimize, transform, and evolve IT capabilities to bring clients into an intelligent cloud future. To safeguard these efforts, its advanced suite of managed security and threat intelligence services and solutions equip clients with a protected data environment and true visibility to adapt to evolving threats.
For more information about how UDT helps school communities identify and implement the right hardware, software, and professional services to thrive, visit www.udtonline.com. To learn more about the Intel vPro®, including trying out the TCO estimator to discover its potential savings, visit www.intelvprotechtour.com.