Challenges faced by enterprise

Driven by the need for better security, a lower total cost of ownership and more rational infrastructures, enterprise is in the midst of an evolution. Never before has enterprise had to tackle so many challenges to successfully connect and provide functionality to staff.

Security

Security breaches, viral attacks, laptop theft, and ‘pod slurping’ by employees, are but a few of the security threats faced everyday by CIOs and their teams, and the cost is extraordinary. Computer related crimes alone cost the United States USD 62.5 billion every year (Source: FB).

Combine this staggering cost with the estimate that 60% of corporate data is stored locally on commercial desktops and notebooks, and that of those computers, 35% are notebooks; when you bear in mind that 10% of laptops are stolen each year, it is easy to see the true scale of the financial and information threats companies face everyday to their commercial and customer data.

Manageability

Infrastructure costs are growing. Ever more employees are being sent into the field to provide better service to customers, and they need the same connectivity & access to data as when they are at their desk. Estimates are that less than 25% of email activity is now from a desktop device and according to the Gartner Group, 46% of American companies and 34% of European companies cited access to internal applications by mobile workers as their number one technology infrastructure concern. Instantaneous communication too, driven by explosive growth of broadband and wireless availability, between employees in-field, at the office and across geographic regions and time zones has become essential for global companies.

Total Cost of Ownership

Until now, corporations have endeavored to address these escalating technology and infrastructure challenges by adding applications to local employee PCs, where company data is stored locally and periodically backed up to a central corporate server. Under this model, however, companies have seen an escalation in both the number of IT staff required to support employees, and in the costs of local software and hardware fuelled by the significant drain to PC system resources caused by layering applications, requiring powerful expensive computers to run the software that the employee needs to use. These corporate computers also significantly increased the overall cost of operation in terms of its power and cooling requirements. As a result, today, a corporate PC priced at USD 2,000 will cost, over of five years of operation more than USD 21,000 (Source: HP).

• Read more about how technology can overcome these challenges