Enterprise spending on mobile connectivity services is growing explosively with no ceiling in sight. However, this will continue to grow, with most companies completely unprepared to manage the impact:
The number of mobile workers is increasing. More than 187.9 million workers are mobile today, and Forrester Research expects that number to reach 397.1 million by 2012—73 percent of the global enterprise workforce.
According to Gartner, North American companies spent between $1,500 and $2,000 per employee on wired and wireless services in 2008, approximately 20 percent of their total IT budgets and growing.
Per-user rates of mobile service consumption are surging, fueled by device proliferation and fragmentation, multi-device ownership and thousands of bandwidth-loving data apps for Androids, Blackberries, iPhones, iPads, tablets and Netbooks.
Corporate data is now as mobile as the corporate workforce. IDC estimates that 70 percent of enterprise data now resides on mobile devices, yet three out of four companies lack comprehensive policies for managing and securing all of their mobile devices.
You need visibility, policy enforcement and mobility management capabilities
To bring mobility costs firmly under control, companies need the ability to manage users, devices and services throughout their separate lifecycles, from procurement and provisioning through configuration and testing, deployment and service management. You need three capabilities:
Per-user cost visibility – The costs of mobility must become visible to both managers and users, with tools and metrics for monitoring and reporting on users, devices and service utilization. Companies need to understand 3G use by individual employee, including domestic and international roaming. They need to know who uses free and paid Wi-Fi services, who are the heavy service consumers and who are the lightweights. Most importantly, all of this information must be consolidated across devices, service providers and geographies and made easily available though a single management interface.
Policy enforcement – Once companies have visibility into service utilization and costs, they need the ability to control those costs through policy implementation and automated enforcement. Business policies can contain costs by limiting or blocking domestic and international roaming, limiting overall usage and enforcing cost-effective connection choices. They can also support risk mitigation by enforcing secure connection behavior by preventing connection to ad-hoc Wi-Fi networks or requiring the use of a VPN.
Centralized control of the mobile user experience – Perhaps the most effective lever available for enterprise mobility costs is the ability to manage, mediate and optimize the mobile user experience. Companies need to eliminate "no connection" downtime by delivering the widest possible selection of network resources. They need to guide users to the connection offering the best access experience at the most cost-effective price point, simplifying the selection and connection processes to reduce help desk costs. Finally, they need to simplify and automate the security practices and behaviors that are required by policy, so that compliant behavior is always the default.
Cost Reduction Opportunities – Can you find these?
Some of the most profitable and widely available cost reduction opportunities include:
Avoiding international roaming charges – Today's international roaming charges commonly range from $3 up to $20 per megabyte. At those rates, if just 1 percent of your mobile users incur a roaming charge, the result can be a 20 percent surcharge on your overall monthly 3G data spend. Really big roaming charge surprises happen! And the problem will only get worse as 3G/4G access bandwidths increase.
Make roaming activity visible through reports and real time alerts that can be sent to users, to IT and to line of business managers.
Provide multi-layer controls capable of detecting and disabling roaming connections, and of detecting and disabling other connection managers.
Route connections to the least-cost option available, including free Wi-Fi and control centrally managed carrier roaming settings.
Reallocating underused 3G subscriptions – For various reasons, most organizations find that 30 to 50 percent of the 3G cards issued to employees go unused each month. They generate monthly recurring service charges but deliver no value, creating what is in essence a surcharge on every active user account. Do you know where your cards are? The challenge is identifying the inactive cards in carrier invoices that typically show only bulk consumption data.
Create monthly utilization reports that can identify every account with no activity in the period, and generate underuse alerts to IT and line-of-business managers. Detailed, per-user activity reports can help IT re-deploy underused cards to more active users, shifting low-volume users to lower-cost Wi-Fi access plans. In an organization with 1,500 3G accounts, shifting the least active 20 percent to Wi-Fi only access can reduce mobility costs by up to $126,000 annually.
Megabyte offload – The era of all-you-can-eat pricing for 3G data services is coming to a close. Carriers are moving to usage-based pricing that will dramatically raise costs for heavy users and bandwidth-hungry applications.
Analyze actual patterns of consumption and cost, by individual user and by business unit.
Set up policy-based control of connection behavior and force high-bandwidth applications onto lower-cost connections
Set up alerts to warn users when fat applications use an expensive connection, calculating and displaying the real-time cost per minute to the company.
Plan optimization –As growing data traffic makes bandwidth increasingly scarce and valuable, carriers are introducing tiered pricing schemes. Don't "set and forget" your user plans, which incurs needless overage charges and wasted megabytes, particularly in the case of high volume, highly volatile users.
Regularly optimize plan assignments using detailed information on individual consumption patterns. Research shows that 70 percent of all employees have 3G data access.
Set up over- and under-consumption alerts to users, IT administrators and line-of-business management.
Block or divert connections to avoid overage charges.
Continuously optimizing 3G plan assignments based on individual utilization data can potentially reduce overall mobility costs by up to 50 percent.
Billing reconciliation – Carrier billing systems are notoriously unreliable, but until now, companies have lacked any automated solution for cross-checking the usage data in aggregated invoices.
Look for granular variance analysis and reporting that compares carrier invoice utilization data with internal records.
Set up automatic alerts to IT and line-of-business managers when errors are detected that exceed a predetermined threshold.
Conduct in-period sampling of carrier portal records for comparison against all data, to identify errors before invoices are created.
Carrier contract renegotiation – Finally, companies that possess detailed per-user data on their 3G service utilization and can aggressively manage that utilization in real time are ideally positioned to extract favorable terms from their carriers at contract time.
iPass changes the economics of enterprise mobility for your organization and radically improves the connectivity experience for internet users. We give IT more visibility and control to contain and reduce mobility costs, maintain security and get your mobile workers online faster and easier - anywhere.
Check out our new connection manager client, 3G cost reports, and Wi-Fi hotspot finder.
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