A few months ago Gartner released their CEO Survey that examines the top challenges and initiatives that executives plan to focus on in 2012.

Over the next few months, I’ll address the top 10 items on this list of Top Strategic Business Priorities identified by Gartner, look at how this relates to IT, and how I believe LANDesk can help your organization address those priorities. The top strategic business priority I’ll address today is improving governance, risk management and compliance.

Organizations are becoming more and more dependent on their information systems. Regulators and the public are increasingly concerned about the proper use of information, particularly personal data.  The threats to information systems from criminals and cyber terrorists are increasing.  Many organizations are identifying information as an area of their operation that needs to be protected through corporate governance plans as part of their system of internal control.

Complete end-to-end device management of mobile devices, notebook computers and desktops can help reduce the risks of exposure, while reducing the cost of management. LANDesk offers several tools to help those responsible for corporate governance and IT management to understand the risks within their environment and then those same tools help mitigate those same risks. Unlike many other solutions on the market that offer piecemeal solutions or point products that solve just one problem, at LANDesk we try to understand the best method of reducing the risks holistically with the least amount of management and impact to your organization.

For example, if you want to protect patient data (health care), or customer credit card data (retail) or corporate intellectual property, you will need a data encryption product. Just simply identifying the need to encrypt the data is not enough from a holistic perspective. You need to know what applications are running on what machine, which devices are currently protected, and those that are not. You will also need to know which users have access to those devices, and even more importantly to have visibility of those devices when they are not within the walls of your corporate building (think Cloud Management).

This is where LANDesk excels in managing holistically, we don’t look at how to encrypt the data, we look at managing your endpoint from end-to-end. LANDesk doesn’t stop at just one element of systems management like many of our competitors do. We take endpoint management serious, because we know that you take endpoint management seriously. LANDesk can help you implement the most effective tools to help improve governance, reduce risk and meet compliance like we did with HDFC Standard Life Insurance Company Limited.

The IT department is looked at by the CEO and other executives as the corporate expert in improving governance and risk management and compliance. This makes it vital to have the right tools in place to meet those needs. Without them, organizations stand a high risk of not meeting their goals.