IT Challenges- The Cost of Mobility

Monday, February 11th, 2013 Chris Witeck, Director Product Marketing

This is part #3 of our blog talking about the recently released Mobile Enterprise Report. Part 1, we talk about ‘BYOD in the Enterprise’, and in Part 2, we talk about ‘Device Choice in the Enterprise’. In our final blog post, we will be talking about some of the IT challenges we uncovered in the Mobile Enterprise Report.

Since iPass is in the business of helping organizations manage mobility costs, we of course are very interested in what IT professionals have to say about the cost of mobility across their organization. First we asked how much IT professionals estimate that mobile employees cost the organization on a monthly basis.

This average factors in the costs of 3G/4G subscriptions as well as employees expensing back Wi-Fi. With that in mind it is interesting to see North America come in with the highest average costs, since free Wi-Fi is abundant across North America and not as common around the rest of the world. This shows that while Wi-Fi may be free, data costs from 3G/4G subscriptions have a big impact in North America- nearly $1200 per year in costs per employee.

We asked IT professionals if they thought mobile data costs (3G/4G) would increase in 2013, and the majority (57%) said yes. When we asked why costs would increase, the biggest responses were due to the impact of smartphones and tablets on the organization.

The top two responses clearing more than 40% of responses both directly deal with the impact of smartphones and tablets- more devices being deployed and more data being consumed on those devices.

Throughout this series of blog posts as well as with previous iPass Mobile Workforce Reports we have been very focused on the impact of BYOD to organizations. We’ve noted how BYOD makes mobile workers feel more productive as they can more easily balance their personal and professional lives.

One of the questions we wanted to get the IT opinion on is whether or not organizations are compensating employees for their data costs on personal devices. We looked at this from all responses, but also looking at organizations that said if they had a formal BYOD policy in place- or not (which we covered in the first blog post in this series- where we noted that 54% of organizations have a formal BYOD policy in place).

What we found was interesting. There definitely was a correlation between having a BYOD policy and more likely to compensate employees for data access from their personal devices, but there still is a sizable percentage of organizations that don’t compensate employees for access from personal devices. This is something we expect to change over time as BYOD becomes more common within organizations- that increasingly organizations will provide some sort of compensation.

Why is that? We have seen in our user focused Mobile Workforce Reports that when employees are balancing work and personal uses for a device- if they are responsible for the data costs on that device they will use it less for work related purposes. What organizations don’t want to see by shifting more users to personal devices is that overall productivity goes down. Thus we expect some sort of policy driven compensation model for data access on personal devices to become increasingly the norm.

The last data point I’ll cover from the Mobile Enterprise Report is around an overall mobility strategy- do organizations have a strategy in place?

What is interesting here is that the majority either said they don’t know what it is, they don’t have one or the one they have is insufficient (63.2%). As things like BYOD introduce more fragmentation into an organization (due to less central control) the risk is that the organization also fragments their overall mobility strategy. The risk of having no strategy, or one that is insufficient or out of date is that the potential for security lapses increase, or mobility costs start to get out of control. I believe most employees want to do the right thing and abide by corporate guidelines, but if those guidelines are not communicated, not in place or not understood, that can lead to problems that impact the bottom line. If your organization fits into the Insufficient/No category, perhaps it is time to sit down and think through your mobility strategy.

I hope you found this blog series useful and informative.

Download the Mobile Enterprise Report>>

We will also be hosting an informative webinar to cover the details of the report with MobileIron.

Tags: cost management, wi-fi access