The survey found that the TCO is comprised of carrier charges (36%), bill shock (14%), hardware (21%), IT resource (10%), additional services (8%) and security (11%).
The survey also revealed that the largest companies had a 35% higher mobile device TCO than small companies. This was largely caused by their greater spend on management platforms such as EMM, customer app building – but also their greater propensity to suffer bill shock.
Bill shock – additional unexpected charges for exceeding carrier plans or roaming charges etc – accounted for 14% of the average TCO, but for the largest companies, it reached an average of £279 per device per annum.
“For years, most enterprises have considered TCO to be simply made up of the cost of the device plus the carrier charges,” comments Eldar Tuvey, CEO of Wandera. “But this is frankly a naive view. In fact, the ‘real’ TCO is twice as much as commonly expected. In the UK, approximately £644 per device of annual costs for services, security and IT are not being taken into account when calculating the TCO of enterprise mobility.”
While the TCO is higher than most businesses think, there is good news. 58% of the TCO is ‘controllable’, in the sense that the costs can be reduced through improved mobile data management, policy setting and security threat prevention. Indeed, in Wandera’s experience, using these measures typically removes about 28% of the total TCO altogether. With approximately 10.4 million corporate liable devices in the UK, a potential saving of up to £3.7 billion is available annually for British businesses.
“Enterprise mobility is now ubiquitous. The use of devices by UK businesses is no longer a case of whether or not to use them, but how best to manage and secure them,” says Tuvey. “As the number of enterprise devices grows, so will the associated costs and risks. Visibility, education, security best practice and effective data cost management are the only ways to defend against your mobility budget leaking away,” concluded Tuvey.
The survey also showed that 18% of respondents reported suffering at least one security breach via a mobile device in the last 12 months, with an average ‘clean-up cost’ of £167,000. The greatest proportion of those companies who suffered a breach (20%) reported that remedying the damage caused by these breaches had cost their companies between £25,000 to £100,000 over the last 12 months. A further 10% reported remediation expenses of more than £500,000.
According to the survey, the cost of remedying a security breach is on average more than three times the amount being spent on prevention. The average spend on mobile security software per device per annum stood at £32, compared to an average £104 to ‘clean up’ the breach.
The survey was undertaken with independent market research partner, Redshift Research, and is available via this link: Uncovering the True Costs of Enterprise Mobility – A study into the total cost of ownership