The economic impact of COVID-19: Cost savings in IT through UEM - Part 1
With the current worldwide work situation, it’s perhaps no surprise that a lot has been written concerning "working from home"; covering what to consider as an employee and methodologies on effective working technique. There is certainly a great deal of fantastic and valuable advice out there, which has no doubt helped many get through the ongoing restrictions of lockdown.
Now that the first steps towards the “new normal” are becoming clearer and the health challenges of COVID are gradually being tackled across the globe, the economic consequences are finally coming to the fore.
Whilst many countries have already set up support and assistance programmes to help businesses, this alone will not be enough for the turbulent road ahead and companies will need to compensate for the lack of turnover they have experienced these past months. No doubt reducing IT costs at this time will be key and IT Teams will be relied upon to discover where these can be made from a technological angle.
Before IT cost savings can be realised however, one must know where the costs are hidden. Personnel costs and infrastructure costs may be known in the company, but what about hidden costs? The costs arising from inefficiencies and risks due to inefficient IT security for example?
Sample calculation: How IT saves time and money with Unified Endpoint Management
Let's take a look at a rebuild of a laptop. A manual rebuild takes about 4 hours to accomplish, so if you consider an average IT salary at £20 per hour (and that is lower average), each machine costs £80 to rebuild. Scale that up to 10 machines needing rebuilding and you have 40 hours and £800 spent, or to 100 machines for 400 hours and £8000.
In comparison, a rebuild with a highly automated UEM tool takes 1 hour per machine for the rebuild. That is £20 per machine, or £200 for 10, or £2000 for 100. That is a labour cost saving of £6000 for 100 machine by optimising your systems with UEM rather than relying on antiquated methodologies.
We also need to remember that this scenario only covers the rebuild of a machine, so if we take into account ongoing tasks, deployments and processes, the cost savings very quickly ramp up. Furthermore, this calculation also doesn’t take into account the productivity increase for the end user who can get back to working after 1 hour, rather than 4!
It is very easy to quickly build a surface level business case for the implementation of UEM, but you can go further still, as there are IT costs hidden in our everyday working patterns.
Stay tuned: Part 2 of this series deals with hidden costs in IT departments!
Rechenbeispiel: So spart die IT Zeit und Kosten mit Unified Endpoint Management
Werfen wir einen Blick auf das Aufsetzen eines Unternehmens-Laptops. Ein manueller Rebuild dauert etwa 4 Stunden. Wenn Sie also ein durchschnittliches IT-Gehalt von 20 € pro Stunde (und das ist ein niedrigerer Durchschnittswert) in Betracht ziehen, fallen für jeden Rechner 80 Euro an. Skalieren Sie das auf 100 Maschinen für eine Abteilung im Home Office und Sie haben 400 Stunden und 8000 € ausgegeben.
Im Vergleich dazu dauert die Überholung mit den Automatisierungslösungen einer UEM-Software nur eine Stunde pro Maschine. Sie sparen sich so schon 6000 Euro und 300 Stunden Arbeit. Wir dürfen dabei nicht vergessen, dass dieses Szenario nur den Rebuild einer Maschine umfasst. Wenn wir also die laufenden Aufgaben, Einsätze und Prozesse berücksichtigen, liegt das Einsparpotenzial noch deutlich höher. Darüber hinaus sollten Sie auch die Produktivitätssteigerung des Nutzers bedenken, der schon nach einer Stunde statt erst nach vier Stunden seine Arbeit wieder aufnehmen kann.
Stay tuned: Im 2. Teil der Artikelserie geht es um versteckte Kostenpunkte in der IT!
