Over the last several weeks, we’ve looked deeply into many aspects of Device as a Service (DaaS). We’ve looked at the cost implications, security advantages, the impact on Windows 7 End of Support vulnerabilities, and specific value propositions for healthcare and education. DaaS is a significant milestone in the evolution of workplace IT, it’s a growing area of interest for our customers, and therefore it’s a priority for our engineers and analysts to address. This week we’re going to look at ways to evaluate DaaS for your own business.
At the end of the day, when it comes time to make a business decision over a switch to DaaS, the bean counters will always focus on measurements in dollars and sense. So as we’re discussing ways to evaluate the costs and benefits of DaaS, we’ll bring it back to costs and ROI. Better yet, we’ve teamed up with HP’s Value Management Office to make a detailed ROI calculator available to our prospects and customers. Just a few inputs from your team and we can provide a detailed written report that itemizes the areas where you’ll see the greatest savings, with granular options to configure the report to your own financial assumptions.
Evaluating DaaS for Your Business
If you’ve already read our series on DaaS, you’ll have a good idea of where you can realize the biggest advantages of DaaS. Here are the basic stages of evaluating the ROI and financial impacts of DaaS:
- Assess the Current State of Your Endpoints—How many users do you have on your network? How many PCs, laptops and mobile devices will be under DaaS management? How many of those systems have passed or are nearing their support end of life? We have diagnostic tools that can be used to gather this information automatically if your IT team doesn’t have a readily available report. In general, the larger the number of endpoints you’re managing, and the more those devices are nearing their end of life, the greater the savings you can achieve. This is in part due to the large capital expense you would have to invest to update and properly secure your network, which under DaaS would change to a much smaller monthly operating expense. There are other savings and benefits that make sense for small networks, but if you have a large network with some out-of-date devices, you really don’t need to read on to know that you should definitely get an evaluation to compare refresh costs to a DaaS option.
- Determine the Full Load of IT Support Costs—Beyond the capital expense of purchasing endpoints, the next biggest factor in finding savings from DaaS is streamlining and offloading endpoint support. The full cost of IT support for endpoint management is often a surprise, even to experienced managers, in part because the growing complexity of applications and the increasing number of cyberattack threats keep adding to the IT workload. Endpoint support costs go beyond deployment and lifecycle management, and include ensuring up-to-date operating systems and security patches, application updates and end-user awareness of security protocols and requirements. Depending on the size of your network, outsourcing endpoint support can pay real dividends, and increase accountability for keeping everything up-to-date.
- Factor in the Risk of a Security Breach—As we’ve discussed over the past few weeks, the vast majority of network breaches these days originate with an endpoint. Many compromised users violated the most basic security procedures, like avoiding phishing links, changing default passwords, or using a machine without updated security or malware detection. The price for making such a mistake can range from the $100,000 one where a K-12 school paid last week to regain access to school records, to the $17M one where a California hospital paid the ransom to get their patient records back online. If your business handles any kind of sensitive personal data, offloading endpoint support is the simplest way to properly bar the door.
- Consider the Cost of User Productivity—This is another one of those hidden costs that can be eye-opening when you do the numbers. Using devices for the duration of their usable life makes good sense. But there’s a point of diminishing returns and heightened vulnerability. The computing landscape is constantly changing, with new networking protocols, new applications and communication tools rolling out every month. As computers fall behind the processing curve, latency and interoperability become a growing challenge. Users on older machines experience more delays in data processing, more dropped or interrupted video conference calls, and more frustration getting new applications to work as expected. These issues aren’t just a problem for morale but come at a calculable cost. You pay the same rate whether a worker is on an optimally functioning machine or one that drags, but the cost for a worker on a slow machine adds up unnecessarily.
Getting the Details in a Written Report
While it’s easy to do a gut check on whether DaaS is an obvious fit for your network, it’s important to get the details and validate your numbers. Fortunately, after years of growing DaaS deployments, we have a wealth of data to benchmark costs and savings for businesses of all sizes and in many industry sectors.
Working with analysts in HP’s Value Management Office, we now have a comprehensive DaaS ROI calculator to do the numbers, with granular filters to match whatever financial assumptions define your business outlook. With just about a dozen basic inputs, like the number of users and devices on your network, the general quality of machines you intend to deploy and the level of service your business requires, we can generate a detailed report with dynamic data modeling to match your business case.
The days of speculating on the switching costs, payoff period and ROI for DaaS really are over, and with access to detailed financial models, there’s no excuse not to crunch the numbers and see if DaaS makes sense for your business. Any time you’re ready to evaluate DaaS, our analysts can help, and the turnaround time can be as short as just a few hours, depending on the complexity of your network. All you need to do is open a request, and we’ll work with you to gather the inputs and generate a report. And if you like the numbers you see, we can help you develop a plan and put your network on the road to DaaS peace of mind.
Request your complimentary DaaS ROI Assessment here.