The Benefits of Mobility-as-a-Service

Mobility-as-a-Service will allow enterprises to tackle their growing list of mobility-related initiatives without increased capital spending or hiring. They will get the benefits of a large investment in a mobile infrastructure without the burden of the financial investment.  Advantages will include:

Improving the Top Line

Enterprises will reach a new level of user productivity as users will no longer be subject to arbitrary limitations of when, and how much they can get done when outside the office. Employees will be productive around the office, at home, and anywhere in public with an Internet connection nearby. Users will have instant access to all of the data and applications that they need without increasing risks to enterprises. It is estimated that a typical 1,000-person enterprise will see a benefit exceeding $7M benefit by enabling an additional 20% of its workforce to be mobile.

Improving Risk Management and Compliance

Today enterprises generally have no way of updating, controlling, and reporting on devices that are off the corporate network. This can be a serious limitation to a business’s risk management capability given the impact of a lost or compromised mobile device. Mobility-as-a-Service extends the reach of enterprises across the Internet where users are today. A cloud-based approach to mobility will provide enterprises with an entire mobile infrastructure outside the perimeter and will deliver a significant increase to their mobile risk management capability through real-time policy enforcement, remediation, and compliance reporting.

Improving the Bottom Line

Mobility-as-a-Service will improve the bottom line of businesses in two ways. First, businesses will be able to save up to 70% over do-it-yourself implementations and ongoing maintenance. Second, by allowing enterprises to further enable users’ mobile activities, enterprises will be able to eliminate many of today’s LAN-based networks and systems.

Improving the Human Line

There is more to running a business than just the top and bottom lines.

A key example is that a business is always judged and measured by the talent it attracts and where it ranks on places to work. According to TrueCareers, 84% of respondents say the ability to telecommute a few days a week is significant when looking for a new job with 80% also believing that telecommuting increases productivity in their current positions. Another example is that today most businesses are paying as much attention to their carbon footprint as they do to traditional financial metrics. A November 2007 MonsterTRAK survey found that 92% of young professionals want to work for an environmentally-friendly company, and 80% would like a job that has a direct, positive impact on the environment.

Five years ago, wireless access and mobility would not register as tools to achieve these corporate objectives. Today, mobility is clearly strategic to achieving both of these. Mobility-as-a-Service provides businesses with a platform to evolve the company’s focus and relationship with its new archetypical employee who highly values flexibility and choice within the work environment and shows sensitivity to the world environment.