Imagine slicing 21 percent off the top of your company’s mobile device costs simply by changing how you distribute devices to employees. It’s not just a thought experiment: that’s exactly what happened for EY Europe when the organization opted to embrace a Device-as-a-Service (DaaS) model for employee mobile devices.
The biggest source of savings? Because EY Europe no longer owned any employee devices itself, it no longer had to manage all those devices (provisioning, pushing security updates, handling repairs and replacements, etc.), which meant it could reallocate that staff to other tasks.
But embracing DaaS offers more than bottom-line savings for enterprise organizations. Here’s a look at five ways DaaS can benefit large corporations.
1. DaaS can prevent downtime
For many knowledge workers, mobile phones are their most important productivity tool. That’s doubly true for those who travel frequently. But when a phone breaks (or malfunctions, is stolen, is lost, or otherwise stops working as intended), the productivity loss can be significant – especially when it can take a week or longer for an in-house IT team to obtain, provision, and ship a replacement.
A DaaS provider can eliminate this kind of downtime: many offer replacement devices within 24 hours when something goes wrong, meaning lost productive time is minimized without the IT team having to drop everything and scramble to get a phone out the door.
Even when phones don’t break, though, DaaS can increase productivity: because most agreements involve regular upgrades, employees can always count on fast, efficient devices running the latest version of software. At enterprise scale, eliminating extra seconds of load time can translate to hours of additional productivity.
2. DaaS can free the IT team for growth work
In an ideal world, enterprise IT teams would be able to focus on building new features, improving existing service offerings, and generally making a company’s tech get better and better and better.
In the real world, though, IT resources are often overwhelmed by support tickets, bug fixes, and time-intensive but unavoidable issues like device malfunctions. Instead of working to move the company ever forward, an awful lot of IT work goes into maintaining the status quo.
DaaS is one way to ease that burden. By outsourcing device management to a third party, internal IT resources can focus more on creative work – or, at the very least, get more done each day by eliminating one more source of context switching. Even better: many DaaS providers offer 24 / 7 support, meaning your employees can enjoy faster resolution to issues than they might from in-house resources.
In fact, DaaS can also make it possible to offload another complex and time-consuming IT task: cybersecurity.
3. DaaS can improve your cybersecurity
Cybersecurity has always been hard; the cybercriminals are forever a few steps ahead of the security teams. The complexity only increases for mobile devices, which employees inevitably use for at least some personal activities, which opens them to security risks that might not be on IT teams’ radar.
DaaS is one way to simplify an organization’s mobile device cybersecurity. DaaS agreements typically include the shipment of fully secure devices as well as real-time security patches and updates managed by the DaaS provider.
Obviously, a lot of security happens at the user level and has nothing to do with software (e.g., leaving a phone unlocked and unattended even briefly could result in a data breach). But with DaaS, you can rest assured that everything it’s possible to manage via software will be managed. With any cybersecurity budget freed up by offloading security work to a DaaS provider, organizations can invest in training for employees.
4. DaaS can reduce waste
Increasingly, consumers want to buy from sustainable organizations – and they’re willing to pay a premium for sustainable products. Wherever your organization is on its sustainability journey, DaaS can help move it further along. How? Many DaaS providers refurbish and repurpose gently used devices once primary users are ready for an upgrade.
If your employees require the newest, fastest models, DaaS can help you ensure they get what they need while also ensuring that their slightly outdated devices have a second life somewhere other than a landfill (or a forgotten supply closet).
That could be increasingly important for US companies in particular if the SEC’s proposed rule on reporting greenhouse gas emissions takes effect.
5. DaaS lets companies keep more cash on hand
In addition to potentially saving an organization money outright, it can also help increase cash on hand by moving device-related costs from capital expenditures to operating expenses.
Rather than purchasing devices outright, DaaS empowers companies to pay a monthly, per-user (or per-device) fee. This can be particularly helpful when a company is scaling up or down and during times of high turnover. Rather than having to internally collect, wipe, and re-provision owned devices, a company with a DaaS-powered mobile fleet can simply have the departing employee send their device back to the DaaS provider and stop paying that employee’s fee.
And because support, repair, and replacement are built into monthly fees, device support budgets tend to be more predictable with DaaS.
As with reallocation of IT resources, this shift in finances can position an organization to more readily seize a new opportunity that arises, should that opportunity require cash on hand.
Boost organizational agility with DaaS
In uncertain economic times, the organizations that succeed tend to be those that are able to adapt to changing conditions quickly. While a culture of agility can take years to fully develop, embracing smaller elements of flexibility throughout an organization – e.g., by switching from owned mobile devices to a DaaS provider – can happen much more quickly.
