The tools to improve visibility and control across your telecoms estate
Part 2: How the right tariffs and tools prevent bill shock and improve uptime
Welcome to the second instalment of our visibility and control blog series. Here, we share why it is important to have awareness and understanding of your telecoms assets, costs and performance to equip the business with the right tools and processes.
In this post, Russell Quddus, Key Account Director at Adam Phones, looks at why firms need an agile approach towards mobile management – having access to the right tools to protect their estate whilst ensuring employees remain connected.
Mobile phones have revolutionised business. A single device can allow employees to make contact with clients or suppliers on the move, to reach information quickly outside of the office, and to maintain productivity wherever they wish.
However, the dominance of mobile device use introduces challenges of overseeing a large mobile estate – multiple users, differing usage profiles, international travel and potentially an array of tariffs, networks and devices to manage.
Mobile use can be costly, especially if employees are using a tariff that fails to match their usage profile, or fails to evolve as they do. For those who travel abroad and rely on mobile data or for those who make international phone calls to communicate with clients, it is key to ensure their tariff is reflective of their activity. With forward planning this can be achieved. The difficulty however, lies in those who are required to travel suddenly or unexpectedly, where the tariff or the service behind your supplier perhaps cannot react to a sudden change in user profile.
On an incorrect or inflexible tariff, these employees are likely to incur large and often unexpected bills, ultimately deterring use and potentially costing the business significant sums. It is not just travel to account for, but also increased data usage domestically – anywhere where there may be limited visibility of how and when employees are using their phones. By employing the right tariff methodology, one that can evolve with your business, can significantly reduce these risks. The costs of unexpected usage can be further mitigated by employing a layer of protection that filters specific web content or applications, and even restricts access to data (or application) by geographical region – taking out those high cost risk countries should a user go off the reservation.
Whilst remote working and the opportunity to travel offers great advantages to both the employee and the business, it does not come without its risks. Mobile devices represent our greatest endpoint threat – they are small, we take them everywhere and we often have access to as much information through them as we do our desktop computers. And when an employee is travelling they potentially become at greater risk of theft. Lost or stolen devices must be immediately locked down to prevent unauthorised access via MDM / EMM, but the user is now instantly less productive unless the business or supplier is able to provide a SIM and handset replacement quickly, allowing them to get connected again promptly.
With so many areas to manage, companies need to consider how they can manage the usage and control aspects of their mobile telecommunications. Without it, hours are lost and consequences build.
The solutions to these challenges, very briefly, are:
- Intelligent tariffing that protects the fleet of users and can adapt to changes in habits – especially short notice foreign travel
- Online visibility of voice and data usage, including where it’s occurring geographically
- Employing policy based services that automatically quarantine certain apps when in certain destinations, or restrict usage altogether
- Using an MDM product and sufficient security policies around the associated devices
- Ability to reconnect users as quickly as possible by activating replacement SIM cards online
At Adam Phones we understand the challenges of managing a mobile estate, and the pressures that businesses face to act quickly. Whether you are looking to keep a close eye on data usage or you need to update tariffs quickly, we can give you the information you need to make these business decisions easily or sometimes avoid you needing to make decisions at all.
To find out more call 0800 123000.
Stay tuned or the next part of our visibility and control series, where we look at the importance of keeping this level of information secure, with tiered level access to telecoms data and redacted billing. Don’t forget, you can also keep in touch with us on Twitter and LinkedIn
