Businesses of all sizes – and especially smaller organisations – often find that deploying and controlling workstation and mobile device protection is not an easy task.

In this situation, centralised management tools can help, but barely half of companies understand their potential. According to the results of a survey conducted by Kaspersky Lab together with research agency B2B International in November 2012, only 52% of companies worldwide use solutions enabling centralised management of their IT infrastructure.

Modern corporate products include a wide range of protection technologies to secure specific nodes in a company’s IT infrastructure, such as workstations and mobile devices. At the same time, each of these nodes needs to be configured to meet business needs and the company’s established security policies.

Centralised management tools can play a significant role in helping achieve this. But, according to B2B International, these tools are used by just half the companies surveyed worldwide. Whereas a mere 30% of companies have fully implemented client management tools, while 29% of those surveyed limited themselves to partial implementation, which is insufficient to effectively control workstations.

Such solutions increase the infrastructure’s security levels, while significantly reducing a company’s IT workload by eliminating the need to configure protection and to monitor the status of each individual workstation.

Kaspersky Security Center, the administration console developed by Kaspersky Lab, enables companies to manage IT protection and offers control over every element of the corporate network. The solution is integral to Kaspersky Lab corporate products, including the new Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business platform.

The capabilities of Kaspersky Security Center have been significantly enhanced within the framework of the new platform due to the addition of the Kaspersky Systems Management and Kaspersky Mobile Device Management modules.

As a result, companies using the platform can now control the protection parameters of workstations and mobile devices, quickly apply corporate security policies, control software and hardware and manage updates, immediately detect and remove dangerous vulnerabilities, and distribute access rights across the local network and so on.

A single server running the Kaspersky Security Center management console offers a number of advantages to companies. These include quick deployment of protection on new workstations, immediate reaction to problems, easing the workload of IT personnel as well as reducing operating costs while increasing performance.