Enterprise mobility costs escalate as spend reaches £1,200 per device per year

Total figure is twice as much as expected as UK businesses shell out £13.2bn annually

It now costs over £1,200 per year to run a corporate mobile device, according to a new report issued by mobile security firm Wandera.

The report finds that the TCO (total cost of ownership) of a single device is 103 per cent more than what most companies expected to pay, with UK businesses forking out a hefty £13.2bn a year in total.

Carrier charges account for 36 per cent of the TCO, while bill shock (i.e. unexpectedly high mobile phone bills) equates to 14 per cent. The cost of the hardware itself and the IT resources needed to run it come to 21 per cent and 10 per cent, respectively.

"Additional services" run to eight per cent while security amounts to 11 per cent of spend.

Wandera also identified that the largest UK companies - as perhaps might be expected - have a 35 per cent higher mobile device TCO than smaller companies. This is mainly due to spending more money on more advanced EMM (enterprise mobile management) platforms as well as building and maintaining mobile application networks for employees.

Unexpected billing costs at large firms apparently amounts to £279 per device.

Security-wise, it was shown that 18 per cent of respondents suffered at least one mobile-based security breach every year, with the annual "clean up cost" of such episodes running to £167,000 per organisation, on average.

Direct damage remedy has cost individual companies between £25,000 and £100,000 over a 12 month period. Ten per cent of respondents reported they'd spent up to £500,000.

The average cost of putting right security breaches is apparently three times the amount being spent on prevention: £32 per device on prevention compared with £104 to deal with breaches.