What Is Workspace ONE Intelligence?

Cloud service with teeth

VMware Workspace ONE® Intelligence is a cloud service that guards over your entire digital workspace. Because everyone wants to work remotely these days – or is doing so already – the boundary around your enterprise is more vulnerable to threats and attacks than it used to be. How do you provide a secure, yet efficient environment for all those users? What you need is a guard dog for your entire system, but not just to spot problems. Your guard dog needs teeth.

Workspace ONE Intelligence is a cloud service built for the VMware Workspace ONE platform that provides deep insights, analytics, and automation for your entire digital workspace. Together, these capabilities strengthen security across your entire environment – a guard dog that protects your environment with vigilance and strength.

Take a look at this introductory video to see how VMware IT uses Workspace ONE Intelligence on a daily basis to proactively identify issues and solve complex problems.

Now that you have a high-level overview of what Workspace ONE Intelligence can do for you and your organization, read on to learn about the key features and architecture.

Main Features

As an IT admin, you need to keep track of multiple devices and apps for multiple users. And you need to understand what is going on with each device, each application, and each user – all at the same time. For this, you need a strategy.

Traditionally, the strategy was to do it all manually. You manually exported data from your system, loaded it into databases, correlated it, identified issues, and resolved them. You needed visualization tools before you could act on the issues. This was very time-consuming:

Now, you can use Workspace ONE Intelligence to aggregate data from a variety of sources, correlate the data for risk-based analysis, and automate proactive resolutions, based on insights gained from rich visualization capabilities. And in the end, you can make smarter decisions and act faster:

Aggregation

With Workspace ONE Intelligence, you can track a rich set of metrics like device health, OS, app performance, users, and network.

• Threat mitigation – You can aggregate threat data from external sources such as CVE lists and Workspace ONE Trust Network. You can analyze risk in-context to your environment and fix with automation.
• Proactive pounce – You can use Workspace ONE Intelligence to increase security by aggregating threat data, analyzing the risk they pose, and proactively pouncing to mitigate threat. Instead of taking a reactive approach, you use Workspace ONE Intelligence to prevent problems in the first place.
• Unified security strategy – You can discover and respond to new security threats and vulnerabilities, and continuously verify risks based on user behavior and device context.

Correlation

Workspace ONE Intelligence can gather and analyze data from multiple sources to calculate risk.

• App analytics – You can understand app performance and adoption with mobile app analytics. Analyze critical user flows and network insights to proactively identify and resolve issues.
• Risk analytics – You can correlate and analyze data from a variety of data sources and leverage machine learning to calculate user risk score based on user activity and device context.

Automation

You can proactively identify issues, troubleshoot, and remediate them with automation using the Freestyle Orchestrator on Intelligence. Freestyle Orchestrator on Intelligence (formerly Intelligence Automations) is a low code, no code workflow platform that helps IT admins automate complex business use cases by sequencing tasks based on a trigger. For example, from data gathered about battery health throughout your organization, you can automate an action to replace each degraded battery. You can set this up proactively, so new batteries arrive before the users even know they need one.

• Automation engine – Workspace ONE Intelligence has a built-in automation engine that can create rules to take automatic action on issues that come up, such as security, efficiency, user experience, and so on. You can orchestrate and automate IT workflows based on pre-defined rules and a rich set of parameters. You can even extend the workflows to third-party tools by using the REST API.
• Efficiency and agility – You can speed up IT tasks, issue resolutions, and patch rollouts with a powerful automation engine that spans internal and third-party tools in your environment.

 

Figure 1: Freestyle orchestration flow that notifies IT via Slack when new high-risk threats are identified.

Visualization

Workspace ONE Intelligence can keep tabs on the status of your devices, applications, delivery process, workflow, and employee productivity. You don’t get buried in data overload, because Workspace ONE Intelligence provides visibility into the aspects from one location.

• Rich visualization – Workspace ONE Intelligence aggregates and correlates data from multiple sources to give you complete visibility into your entire environment. You can aggregate and correlate data from multiple sources across your digital workspace to visualize environment KPIs, understand trends, and identify issues.
• App analytics – You can understand app performance and adoption with mobile app analytics. Analyze critical user flows and network insights to proactively identify and resolve issues.

Figure 2: Summary of threats detected across the Workspace using the Security Risk dashboard.

Action

Workspace ONE Intelligence helps you act more efficiently by identifying issues, performing root-cause analysis, and configuring automatic responses. You don’t get bogged down with spreadsheets and scripts that traditionally required continual attention.

• Smarter, data-driven decisions – Workspace ONE Intelligence produces the insights and data that allow you to make the right decisions for your VMware Workspace ONE deployment. You can leverage machine-learning models based on a rich set of data points to gain deep insights across your cross-platform digital workspace, including desktop and mobile devices, OS, applications, and users.
• Employee productivity – Workspace ONE Intelligence is designed to simplify user experience without compromising security. You can monitor digital workspace metrics that impact employee experience. You can proactively identify issues, perform root cause analysis, and quickly provide a fix.

For more information, see Workspace ONE Intelligence.

Architecture

Workspace ONE Intelligence is part of Workspace ONE, the overarching solution that was designed to allow you to manage all kinds of devices and applications from a single location. Workspace ONE interacts with all users and all devices, no matter where, which presents a perfect opportunity to collect metrics from end users about app usage, device types, contexts, and session data.

Workspace ONE Intelligence is designed to take full advantage of this opportunity. You can monitor digital workspace metrics that impact user experience. You can gather access data such as software and hardware versions, software installed, locations, and Wi-Fi. You can gather identity data such as when a user logs in, which apps and virtual desktops they used, and for how long. You can proactively identify issues, even before the user notices, and remediate them automatically. All of this helps to improve productivity and engagement.

Workspace ONE Intelligence components

Workspace ONE Intelligence aggregates, correlates, and analyzes data from multiple. From this, it produces reports, dashboards, and alerts, providing you with integrated insights. As an IT administrator, you can set up automation and machine learning to proactively improve end-user experience, strengthen security risk compliance, and optimize IT operations.

Workspace ONE Intelligence includes the following interacting components:

• Data sources – Gathers data from Workspace ONE UEM, Workspace ONE Access, Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK (formerly known as Apteligent), VMware Horizon, Common Vulnerability and Exposures (CVE), and Workspace ONE Trust Network.
• Workspace ONE Intelligence Connector – Collects and feeds data to the Workspace ONE Intelligence cloud service; required for on-premises UEM environments only.
• Intelligence Cloud Service – Aggregates data from Connectors, generates and schedules reports, and populates the dashboard so data is easily visualized.
• Workspace ONE UEM – Provides endpoint analytics from UEM-managed and registered devices.
• Workspace ONE Access – Provides identity analytics based on user and event data around Workspace ONE logins and app loads for apps you deploy in the Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub catalog.
• Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK – Provides app analytics for mobile applications, including load numbers, network events, and incident reports.
• VMware Horizon – Provides experience analytics based on virtual apps and desktops data as part of the Experience Management solution. This data helps administrators to understand the overall experience of their Horizon deployments and act to improve or fix your users’ experiences.
• Trust Network – Provides threat data from security solutions including endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions, mobile threat defense (MTD) solutions, and cloud access security brokers (CASB). This integration provides Workspace ONE Intelligence users with insights into the risks to devices and users in their environment.

For more information, see Reference Architecture: Workspace ONE Intelligence Architecture.

 

Experience and Vulnerability Management Solutions

The rich set of integrations provided by Workspace ONE Intelligence enables the Experience Management and Vulnerability Management Solutions, which are workspaces that gather all the necessary objects for a feature into a single area in Workspace ONE Intelligence. Solutions can include widgets and processes from dashboards, workflows, and reports so you can view the health of features and analyze them, find issues, and fix them.

Experience Management Solution helps organizations gain insights into the employee experiences with their digital workspace. Experience Management provides insights about apps, operating system stability, and performance. It also displays analytics for key performance indicators that impact employee experiences such as start time, shutdown time, logon, and logout events.

Figure 3: Experience Score dashboard in Workspace ONE Intelligence

Vulnerability Management Solution combines and displays information from Workspace ONE UEM and from third-party reporting services that report security data, enabling IT administrators to find vulnerabilities reported by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), see what CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) impact their Windows Desktop and iOS devices that are managed by Workspace ONE UEM, as the event’s CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) score, NIST articles, and Microsoft advisories.

Figure 4: Vulnerability Management dashboard for Windows Devices

A deeper view

Now that you’ve got an idea of what it can do, check out this video for how to actually use Workspace ONE Intelligence to manage vulnerability and patching, customize reports, utilize sensors, automate for compliance, and orchestrate applications and profiles for mobile devices:

Learn more

Here are some great places to go to learn more about Workspace ONE Intelligence:

• Workspace ONE Intelligence product page
• Workspace ONE Intelligence Solution Overview video
• Workspace ONE Intelligence Architecture
• Architecting VMware Workspace ONE Intelligence video
• Workspace ONE Intelligence - What is it? (linkedin.com).

Learn about other VMware products

If you are interested in other VMware products, see the following introductions:

• What Is Workspace ONE?
• What Is VMware Workspace ONE UEM?
• What Is VMware Horizon?
• What is VMware Dynamic Environment Manager?
• What Is Digital Employee Experience (DEX)?