The following is a guest blog post by Forrester Consulting.
Organizations are on the hunt for unified endpoint management solutions (UEM) to help improve the user experience, make their teams more productive, while simplifying the management of endpoints and improving their security posture. To learn more about how IBM MaaS360 with Watson helps organizations meet these needs, IBM commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study to examine the value that organizations could achieve by deploying MaaS360. MaaS360 provides a UEM solution that enables its customers to manage endpoints and end users in a central console. We interviewed two organizations and conducted an additional 17 online interviews to better understand the benefits, costs, risks, and flexibility of MaaS360. The customers Forrester spoke with had the following characteristics:
- Interviewed a wide variety of industries, including financial services, nonprofit, utilities, production manufacturing, and professional services.
- The titles interviewed included IT decision makers like director of mobile product and innovation, senior product manager of mobile devices, manager of technology operations and lead engineer for mobile devices
- Endpoints managed ranged from 500 to 100,000 endpoints.
Prior to MaaS360, user experience and management capabilities varied drastically across devices and operating systems. Only a small subset of applications were available on mobile devices; one interviewee noted that they were only able to offer five to six applications on mobile devices. These limitations greatly reduced end user’s ability to work outside of the office.
The IT departments spent significant amounts of time configuring, deploying, and maintaining endpoints. Prior to adopting MaaS360, each step of the process was highly manual. The organizations relied on high-touch configuration processes that required all endpoints to be shipped to one central location. From there, IT administrators had to further configure endpoints and verify everything was working properly during the deployment process. Once fully deployed, the IT department had limited visibility into endpoints which made resolving tickets or auditing and updating endpoints difficult.
With the investment in MaaS360, the interviewed organizations wanted to consolidate the management of their endpoints, regardless of device type or OS on one centralized platform. Furthermore, the organizations hoped to streamline the configuration and setup process. The organization believed that the increased visibility and management capabilities enabled by adopting a UEM solution, would not only reduce the time and effort required to manage endpoints but also improve end user productivity through an improved UX.
To understand the impact of the investment in MaaS360, Forrester constructed a financial model, a composite company, and an associated ROI analysis that illustrates the areas financially affected. The composite organization is representative of the organizations Forrester interviewed, and it is used to present the aggregate financial analysis in the next section. The composite organization that Forrester synthesized from the customer data has the following characteristics: A US-based, global, multibillion-dollar financial services organization with annual revenue of $1.3 billion.
The organization has over 9,500 employees spread across six offices around the globe and as remote workers. The composite organization has over 22,000 endpoints; providing many of its workers with both a laptop or desktop and a mobile phone. The composite organization has the following device types in its ecosystem:
Prior to the investment in MaaS360, the organization did not leverage a single UEM solution to manage everything within its ecosystem. The organization was using some management tools for some of its endpoints, but in general, management was uneven and inconsistent.
Based on the experiences of the interviewees, Forrester found that the composite organization experienced the following benefits after implementing IBM MaaS360 with Watson:
- Reduced the time needed to configure endpoints by 96%. With MaaS360’s low-touch, no-touch deployment capabilities, the composite organization no longer had to manually provision and image endpoints individually. Furthermore, the organization could now ship endpoints to their final destination instead of needing to configure everything at its headquarters.
- Reduced the time needed to setup end users by 47%. The granular configurations enabled by MaaS360 reduced the amount of additional configuration and setup IT administrators have to do with end users. IT administrators no longer have to deal with department specific configurations and can instead focus on answering end user questions, going over the capabilities of the user’s new device, and, for new hires, go over corporate policies.
- Modern management of devices decreased time spent on auditing by 58%, and updating devices by 50%. With MaaS360, the ability to manage and secure devices became far more simplified. IT administrators now had full visibility into their security posture across endpoints and operating systems in one, centralized console. Furthermore, MaaS360 enables the IT organization to apply patches and updates quickly and easily, regardless of whether a device is on the enterprise network. Reduced the number of tickets received by 50% and reduced the remediation time by 50%. SSO, a self-service portal, and an AI assistant all reduce the number of tickets end users submit every year. In addition, the added visibility and control provided by MaaS360 enables IT administrators to resolve tickets faster than before. MaaS360 helps IT administrators resolve tickets faster by giving them improved visibility and control into endpoints. IT administrators can remotely push updates or applications to an endpoint or do a screen-sharing session to see exactly what problem and end user are experiencing.
- Cost savings on remediation of incidents due to 80% reduction in cyber security incidents. With features like modern management that enables organizations to ensure endpoints are in compliance, identity management features like SSO and MFA, container apps to ensure personal data is separate from work for strong data leak prevention, and application security, organizations reduced its security posture across all endpoints. Furthermore, IBM MaaS360’s mobile threat defense and AI-powered insights and analytics enabled organizations to detect, analyze, and remediate malware threats faster than before. With MaaS360, organization are able to reduce the number of security incidents each year. This results in a three-year, risk-adjusted PV savings of over $2.2 million.
- Two and a half minutes saved per end user per day due to improved access. In addition to the benefits listed above, end users could now access important files and applications across more devices and geographies, increasing their productivity outside of work. For example, the Director, mobile product and innovation for a Financial services firm explained that in their previous state, mobile phones “had only five or six applications. With MaaS360, we’re now offering our end users with over 60 applications that add extreme value.”
Forrester’s interviews and subsequent financial analysis found that an organization based on these customers experienced benefits of $5.6 million over three years versus costs of $2.1 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $3.4 million and an ROI of 160%.
Take advantage of the opportunity to learn more about the full July 2019 case study. IBM hosted a webinar on June 6 with featured guest speaker Adrienne Capaldo of Forrester Research. In this on-demand recording, Adrienne goes into further depth on the TEI study and shares additional use case examples, key results and a financial summary that can be used to measure your potential ROI on your UEM investment.