Building a high-tech learning environment
Pima is developing a reputation as a high-tech institution, aligned to the Tucson region’s growing aerospace, defense, and healthcare industries. Through its Centers of Excellence, the college delivers workforce training in areas such as applied technology, healthcare, aviation, cybersecurity, and automotive. At the same time, it is strengthening partnerships with local employers and investing in industrial-grade IT infrastructure to prepare students for real-world careers.
Managing and securing diverse endpoints at scale
Under the leadership of Isaac Abbs, CIO at Pima, the college has transformed its entire IT strategy. Everything has been redesigned around creating a secure, zero-trust environment that empowers faculty, staff, and students to do their best work.
One of the most complex stages of the transformation was integrating nearly 10,000 endpoints into that zero-trust model. As a multi-site institution with a small endpoint team and constrained budgets, Pima needed a way to manage and secure a geographically distributed and highly diverse device environment without adding operational overhead.
“In higher education, budgets are tightening, and we don’t have the ability to keep adding people just to manage devices,” says Abbs.
The challenge was compounded by extreme device diversity. Faculty, staff, and students used Windows, macOS, iOS, and Chromebooks, alongside highly specialized devices in Pima’s Centers of Excellence, including IoT systems and VR equipment.
To manage this mix of devices, the IT team relied on multiple legacy lifecycle management point solutions. Because none of the tools could manage the full fleet, operations were fragmented and required significant manual effort.
“We are effectively managing the IT environments of multiple industry verticals,” says Abbs. “When you’re supporting 40,000 students and 2,500 employees, and every discipline requires different tools, provisioning, patching, and securing devices is really fragmented and inconsistent.”
The result was tool sprawl, gaps in functionality, and increased exposure to risk. Without a unified approach to endpoint management, Pima was in danger of undermining its zero-trust strategy and its ability to scale securely. “Endpoint management was a major pillar of our digital program,” Abbs says. “We knew it would also be one of the most complex.”
A single solution for unified endpoint management
Pima selected Omnissa Workspace ONE® UEM as the foundation for its endpoint management strategy.
“We chose Workspace ONE because it lets us control all our devices—Windows, Mac, iOS, and Chromebooks—from a single pane of glass,” says Abbs. “It also scales with a small endpoint team.”
From initial enrolment through ongoing patching, updates, and compliance enforcement, Workspace ONE enables common policies, security and schedules across device types while providing both IT and security teams with shared visibility into device status and posture.
“If you can use one solution with common patching schedules and common security controls, it makes things a lot easier than trying to do the same thing across multiple tools,” says Abbs.
Pima also uses Omnissa Workspace ONE® Intelligent Hub as a centralized entry point for app delivery. Core tools such as Microsoft 365 are automatically provisioned, while faculty, staff, and students can install role-based or specialized apps on demand. “Higher education depends on a lot of niche software,” says Abbs. “With Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub, users can get what they need without IT having to package and deploy every request.”
Stronger security with significant operational and cost savings
By consolidating multiple point solutions and implementing Workspace ONE, Pima established a centralized approach to endpoint management that spans its full range of device types and operating systems, supporting the college’s zero-trust strategy at scale.
“With Workspace ONE, we can manage and secure devices whether they are on campus or off the network,” says Abbs. “Shared visibility gives us direct insight into device posture, patch status, and configurations without relying on separate vulnerability or monitoring tools. That consistency has significantly strengthened our security posture.”
The unified approach has also reduced the operational burden on Pima’s IT organization. By consolidating tools and workflows—from device provisioning and patching to security policy enforcement—the small endpoint team can now manage a large and highly diverse endpoint environment without additional headcount. The time saved allows staff to focus on higher-value work rather than routine device management.
End users have also seen tangible improvements. “Our user base is about as diverse as our devices,” says Abbs. “Providing an enhanced and consistent user experience, combined with self-service app delivery through the Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub, has been a tremendous win.”
Beyond operational and user benefits, Workspace ONE has delivered financial flexibility. “Our goal was always better control, stronger security, and a better user experience,” Abbs adds. “But by consolidating tools and renegotiating contracts, we’ve been able to redirect those financial savings to fund Workspace ONE.”
Advancing toward an autonomous workspace with AI-driven workflows
Looking ahead, Pima plans to build upon its foundation of Workspace ONE by adopting AI-driven capabilities via Omnissa platform services like Omni, Omnissa Intelligence, and Omnissa Freestyle Orchestrator to further streamline endpoint operations.
“I believe that AI within the Omnissa platform will offer significant opportunities when it comes to automatically sourcing, packaging, and deploying niche higher-education apps,” he says. “Using AI-driven workflows and AI agents to handle routine endpoint tasks could save us hundreds of hours of IT time, while improving consistency, pushing us further along on our journey to increased back-office automation.”
For Pima, these capabilities support a long-term goal of doing more with less. “With Workspace ONE continuing to evolve, we can remain lean without sacrificing control or security,” Abbs says.