In the current consumer-led climate, enterprise organizations exist in a state of perpetually-tightened purse strings. Different organizations in different sectors face different degrees of austerity. But most face an environment characterized by shrinking budgets – upon which cost-saving shots must be taken.
Telecom expense audits provide organizations with a rare opportunity to achieve this – improving visibility, strengthening security, and enabling optimization. Here’s how.
1. Greater Visibility
An enterprise telecom environment is a vast, complex, and intricate ecosystem.
Comprised of IT infrastructure, fixed and mobile devices, and employee-owned hardware characterized by the ever-increasing bring your own device (BYOD) movement, it's labyrinthine in nature. To keep track of the many MACDs (move, add, change, disconnects) that occur for employees spread all over the world can be a virtually impossible task. And as each day passes, more MACDs arise, and the greater the haziness becomes.
Performing a telecom expense audit enables organizations to capture a baseline of all their telecom assets in every location across the world. It provides visibility into all aspects of their physical inventory, offering detailed insight into discrepancies between telecom inventory and telecom spend. These anomalies can then be reviewed, disputed, and resolved to generate much-needed and significant reductions in spending.
2. Optimized Infrastructure
Telecom infrastructure is a core foundation upon which the global enterprise is built.
It represents the fifth largest operational expense and has a defining role in the growth and modernization of a company, so any opportunity to improve business efficiency while reducing costs in this area must be taken.
Auditing can find any problem areas in your telecom infrastructure. Underutilized equipment and non-functioning lines are a wasted expense, and ensuring that unused or unwanted assets are removed, and new assets are used more efficiently, generates substantial cost-savings.
3. Improved Security
Modern-day enterprise security is of paramount importance.
High-profile data breaches of recent years have forced many organizations to take a closer look at their security technologies and policies. Meanwhile, exposure to the steady volume of company breaches has also led to increased scrutiny from legislators and compliance organizations. So much so that the 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study from the Ponemon Institute, puts the global average cost at $3.6 million, or $141 per data record.
The practice of performing a telecom expense audit enables companies to understand what devices are connected to the network and determine whether they pose a threat to the integrity of the organization. By bolstering security procedures and evaluating their ability to protect data resources, companies not only demonstrate their efforts to regulators, but also minimize the threat of breaches. This serves to improve initial response time to attacks, shortening the time-frame hackers are in the system, reducing the fallout and money lost.
Performing Telecom Expense Audits
At an enterprise-level, performing regular telecom expense audits is key. The process of trawling through billing records, contracts, tariffs and inventories by location may not sound that inspiring, and telecom auditing challenges can be prevalent, but the cost-savings delivered are more than worth the effort.
To learn more about telecom expense audits, including how to extract the greatest value possible, why not talk to Cass today? Or, to learn why Gartner views us as the only publicly-traded vendor with global delivery capabilities to support enterprise-level expenses, download the telecom expense management guide.
Topics: Expense Audit
