Most organisations will now be rolling out more sophisticated devices or “smartphones” which effectively act  as mini computers. These devices can contain sensitive contact and business data that is used in the field and additionally increasingly remote access into an company’s central computer system for matters such as stock availability, order updates etc.

What happens when one of these devices is lost or stolen or indeed if subject to a virus attack or infection?

1. Is access secure, if so how easy would it be to crack passwords etc?

2. Is the device protected with antivirus and firewall software for the same reasons as the main corporate network; if not the corporate network may be at risk.

3. Are you able to track your devices and monitor the use to which they are being put eg social networking, other non business-productive use ?

4. Does the business have the ability to remotely wipe the device to protect sensitive business data and prevent access to unauthorised users?

Simply put every organisation, no matter how small, must have a policy and tools that protect it from unauthorised access and also unpredicted costs from misuse. The cost of not following some simple practices could be very significant in terms of direct damage to the business and its intellectual property. Even at the smaller end of the scale it may not be that cost prohibitive, indeed there are some excellent free tools already available such as “mylookout.com” for example, which can provide some basic (and even more sophisitcated like tracking) safeguards.

There is no “one size fits all”; solutions and product selection should only be made after careful examination and critical analysis of an organisation’s requirements and operational processes which will all differ. Neither is the matter a static one off examination. Mobility security should be as much an endemic business process as other computer based security.

Please note the writer does not endorse any particular products which are mentioned in this article.

Everything Everywhere Limited was officially integrated on the 1^st July 2010 and is the merger of T-Mobile UK and Orange UK.

As one company, it has over 30 million customers, 16,000 employees and 700 stores nationwide. Over the next three years, Everything Everywhere plans to offer innovative and cohesive communications services that enable customers to do business more effectively, improving their productivity by up to 15%. It is offering a commitment to fostering new ways of working through partnerships, unrivalled communications services that enable new ways of working and the might of the R&D of the company’s parents, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom.

Time will tell whether this merger will bring innovation to the UK mobile market or reduced competition with one dominant player. However with such a large number of stores in similar high street locations, some rationalisation would seem inevitable.

A 15% productivity gain is a very ambitious target but not one that is easy to measure or to demonstrate. A 15% reduction in prices would be a welcome boost to customers profit margins, but that does not seem likely!

As for the new company name, at least it is better than Orange-T and perhaps Deutsche-France would not have worked too well in the UK marketplace.

 On the 1^st April Ofcom set out proposals to cut mobile termination rates, the costs mobile operators charge other telecoms companies for carrying their traffic over their networks. Ofcom argues that this will lead to cheaper calls for consumers and much of the resulting press coverage has suggested that operators have been overcharging thanks to these costs.           

 An O2 spokesperson remarked: “To say that Ofcom’s proposal will lead to cheaper calls for UK consumers is both simplistic and misleading. We are a business and if our business model changes we have to do something to compensate. We have spent over £10 billion on our mobile network to date, and with surging demand for data and the requirements of next generation networks, we have earmarked hundreds of millions of pounds more to invest.   If we cannot recoup some of this investment through mobile termination rates, we have two choices. Either we raise prices in other areas, such as Pay & Go or data, and cut handset subsidies, or we cut back on our investment”.  

Very similar statements were made by the other mobile operators echoing O2’s stance that a cut in MTR would cause either reduced investments or price increases in other areas. They also point out that the UK is the most competitive mobile market in Europe with margins well below all other EU countries and that there is no evidence of excessive profit taking or overcharging. 

Formal responses from the mobile operators to Ofcom’s current MTR proposals will made shortly. This argument is far from over !

On the 1^st April (perhaps not the best date !) Ofcom announced that this charge is to be reduced to 0.5 pence and should come into effect in the first half of 2011.

This is undoubtedly good news in general for users as most will see a cost reduction, but it is very unlikely that the mobile phone operators will just accept this reduction in profit margin. Most mobile contracts come with free handsets or a significant hardware fund which are in essence a subsidy of the monthly costs. In the future these subsidies may become less generous. Similarly each handset is subject to a fixed monthly service charge and this may increase.

The overall impact on users will be complex and all the operators will find different ways of implementing the change to protect their revenues and to make it as difficult as possible to compare the offerings from the networks. However for those wishing to move networks, there is some good news as Ofcom also announced that they are making it quicker to transfer mobile numbers, cutting the time period to just one working day rather than the current two.

2. ‘Think before you print’ tags for emails and documents encourages staff to consider the impact of printing and paper consumption

3. Find out how much energy is used overnight to understand the scale of your energy waste problem

4. Mark energy-hungry devices with a prominent “green dot” to remind users to switch them off each night.

5. External expertise can analyze energy use and monitor performance. (http://www.erauk.net)

6. Enabling power-save options can reduce energy consumption by 95%

7. A ‘green suggestions box’ will enable colleagues to add thoughts on the ongoing green improvements

8. The Carbon Trust offers a free energy survey to those businesses that spend over £50,000 per annum on power.

9. 7-day plug-in timers fitted to key equipment is a sound investment

10. Equipment uses energy, but people use equipment. Training staff on equipment use can achieve savings

Following a concerted and coordinated effort from groups of customers focused on IT cost reduction, SAP’s Enterprise Support package will no longer be mandatory for all customers as had originally been planned. Instead, the company will offer a tiered support model, effectively allowing customers to keep their existing support contracts. The reversal may have wider implications for software license agreements across the industry.

“We welcome this news from SAP and are delighted that it is offering greater choice to its customers and our members,” said Alan Bowling, chairman of SAP’s UK & Ireland User Group. The company says the option of standard support for software license agreements will still be available, albeit at an increased rate of 18%. The vendor is also to cancel proposed price increases for this year. It is a step in the right direction for IT managers keen to reduce IT costs.

According to a statement, the software license agreement for Standard Support includes legal updates, problem resolution, knowledge transfer and quality management to keep SAP systems running, while Enterprise Support adds “business continuity, business process improvement, protection of investment and accelerated innovation, and reducing total cost of operations (TCO) of a customer’s IT landscape”. With a focus on IT cost reduction, decision makers will be relieved that they retain control over making the additional investment decision or not.

In a blog post, SAP market commentator Helmuth Guembel said the decision was down to a potential huge fall in revenue and it could well see an increase in moves by customers to renegotiate software license agreement terms they expect from their service providers in the industry as a whole. “CIOs from SAP’s premium customer network gave feedback that is hard to print and by November, SAP was facing a certain maintenance income loss of over 200m Euros for 2010. The list of accounts that SAP in an internal analysis marked as ’maintenance at risk’ was long, much longer than anybody had expected,” he wrote.

Could 2010 prove to be the year when the pendulum of power may favour those focused on IT cost reduction through structured and co-ordinated negotiations?

As well as being a means to achieve IT cost reductions, improved governance of software assets throughout their lifecycle enables your organisation to mitigate risk, respond more quickly to change and manage complexity within the organisation. Software asset management, and the control and protection of software assets throughout their life cycle, is a critical component to any organization’s ability to successfully manage and reduce costs in IT.

The implementation of many IT processes, including configuration, release, or change management, is dependent on the organization having accurate knowledge of its IT assets. IT cost reduction is seriously compromised when an organization does not know what software assets it has, where they are deployed, how the assets are configured and how or by whom they are used.

In recent months there have been significant changes in Microsoft’s licensing frameworks and application footprint. It is a constant source of amazement and bemusement to colleagues and clients who do not have a direct involvement in IT procurement and software asset management that Microsoft’s licensing can be so incredibly complex that Microsoft needs to have extensive professional training courses on choosing licensing options.

Licensing is part of the ‘Microsoft Certified Professional’ development programme, part of which includes designing and providing Microsoft volume licensing solutions to small and medium organisations. Companies that are confused by the variety of Microsoft products, product licenses and pricing options can take advantage of are well-advised to seek professional software asset management support.

The fact is, buying out of the box is quite straightforward. But unless your organisation is no more than just you and a few other colleagues, you need to give careful consideration to how you license your Microsoft product requirements. If you are keen to explore how your organisation can better avail itself of effective software asset management to achieve IT cost reductions, please do contact me for informal or formal advice.

For businesses with a keen interest in IT security management and how to stop spam, the annual status report produced by the EU ‘cyber security’ Agency – ENISA (the European Network and Information Security Agency) will make grim reading. The report looks at spam budgets, impact of spam and spam management. Since last year, no significant progress is being reported in the fight against spam. In last year’s report, 6% of emails were delivered to inboxes as clean; down to just 5% in this year’s report.

IT Security Management - Dr Udo Helmbrecht

The survey targeted email service providers of different types and sizes, who between them manage 80 million mailboxes. The report highlights some key IT security management considerations. ISPs consider spam prevention as a competitive advantage to attract and retain customers. IT managers with a focus on how to stop spam should see this as an opportunity to select carefully. A third of very large email providers dedicate anti-spam budgets of in excess of Euro 1 Million per year.

The Executive Director of ENISA, Dr Udo Helmbrecht concludes:

“Spam remains an unnecessary, time consuming and costly burden for Europe. Given the number of spam messages observed, I can only conclude more dedicated efforts must be undertaken. Email providers should be better at monitoring spam and identifying the source.”

Over half of all ISP’s implement the following mechanisms: blacklisting, content filtering, sender authentication, blacklisting of URI’s and greylisting. The report details a range of other areas that are used to stop spam. With IT security management at the fore of many IT budgets in 2010, the question of how to stop spam is likely to be a key differentiator as businesses choose their ISP relationships this year.

Survey respondents identified the following benefits in moving to cloud-based services:

• Over 50 percent of respondents indicated they will drive down operating costs through better use of IT staff and better cost predictability
• More than 35 percent of respondents indicated they will reduce errors resulting from manual processes, noting that manual processing creates the largest hindrance in their current B2B integration capabilities
• Approximately a third of all respondents expect to achieve greater visibility into their B2B processes

“The research confirms that companies are now ready to take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of cloud-based B2B integration solutions and embrace the ‘pay-for-use model’ that cloud computing represents,” comments David Carmichael, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Sterling Commerce.

Gartner estimates that worldwide cloud services revenue will increase from $46.4 billion in 2008, to $150.1 billion in 2013. More specifically for integration as a service (IaaS), Gartner estimates that companies worldwide spent more than $1.5 billion on IaaS and B2B integration outsourcing in 2009. The purchase of integration services is expected to expand greatly over the next five years, driving companies to consider their strategy in this area in order to take maximum advantage of B2B services in their implementation of B2B projects.

“In today’s economy, companies are becoming acutely aware they need to optimize their B2B integration capability to reduce costs today and become more agile for competitive growth tomorrow. Achieving this at a time when few Boards are prepared to entertain a project without a guarantee of an ROI, typically within a 12-month window, the ability to move from a capital expense to an operational one makes cloud-based B2B integration compelling,” concludes Carmichael.

Cancelled Meetings

Consider videoconferencing as an acceptable alternative
1. Technology means that with now ever increasing broadband data speeds and reliability a reasonable quality of service can be obtained no matter where you are.
2. Staff are familiar with this form of technology at a consumer level eg MSN, Skype, such that transition to using more developed B2B systems is not a quantum leap.
3. Videoconferencing acts as a viable alternative where travel can’t be made, due to severe weather for example, but also consider the pure cost saving opportunity through lack of travel time and costs. A very quick R.O.C. is usually produced when Videoconferencing is adopted.
4. Additionally the ecological impact of travel should not be ignored either.

Staff not making it into work- contingency planning

Businesses should consider what happens to customer service when staff are unable to make it into work:
How does a business continue to receive and deal with inbound calls?

1. Current levels of technology should allow staff to work from home in a seemless way, but many businesses have not yet fully explored the potential.
2. New technology extends not only to telephony but to systems integration as well such that calls can be taken at home as if in the office and business databases can also be made available to allow transactions to take place.
3. Consider how easily can calls be transferred from usual numbers to alternatives when needed.
4. What is the call flow flexibility when staff are not in one central point?
5. There is nothing worse than a customer’s call or new business opportunity not being answered.
6. Those businesses which are able to continue virtually as normal stand out from the crowd.
7. These businesses additionally do not suffer significant profit erosion as they are able to continue to trade at near normal levels.

A proper professional assessment of current processes is recommended as whilst many companies have IT contingency plans we often find that alternative arrangements for telecommunications are sadly lacking in most businesses and if they do exist it’s only at such a nominal level, not to be worthwhile.
Finally on this point it’s not just about weather, consider illness, power failure, complete building inaccessibility as equal reasons to properly plan

The aim of this article is to simply raise awareness again of this important area, not give generic recommendations, given a bespoke solution is ideally required for each business, considering the industry, number of sites, staff and customer levels involved, to name a few criterion.

The Expense Reduction Analysts Communications Team are able to work with clients to assess these important issues.