How much do UK businesses spend on mobile devices per year?

An average business in the UK spends approximately £1,272 every year on a mobile device and all the expenses that come with owning one.

Those are the results of a new survey by mobile data security firm Wandera. Surveying 500 UK IT decision makers, Wandera’s survey has shown the true cost of ownership (TCO) of mobile devices for UK enterprise.

Here’s how the expenses are split: carrier charges take up 36 percent of cost, hardware 21 percent, bill shock 14 percent, security 11 percent, IT resource 10 percent and additional services 8 percent.

There are two particularly interesting things about this report: one is that bill shock (additional unexpected charges for exceeding carrier plans or roaming charges), that takes up 14 percent of TCO, can jump up to 21.9 percent for the largest companies.

Larger companies, per annum, can pay up to £279 per device for bill shock.

Another important discovery is that more than half (58 percent) of TCO is controllable. "Costs can be reduced through improved mobile data management, policy setting and security threat prevention", the company said in a press release, adding that using these measures usually removes about 28 percent of the total TCO.

"For years, most enterprises have considered TCO to be simply made up of the cost of the device plus the carrier charges", comments Eldar Tuvey, CEO of Wandera. "But this is frankly a naive view. In fact, the 'real' TCO is twice as much as commonly expected. In the UK, approximately £644 per device of annual costs for services, security and IT are not being taken into account when calculating the TCO of enterprise mobility".

Published under license from ITProPortal.com, a Net Communities Ltd Publication. All rights reserved.

Photo credit: Syda Productions / Shutterstock