Telecom expense management (TEM) is a buzz phrase in a lot of industries. In essence, TEM is the method of contracting a third-party to help you track and analyze all of the technology-related spending in a company. In order to gather that data, you have to take a deep look at every facet of your operations. It’s not unreasonable to expect that such a deep dive could lead to better operations. Here are four ways you can expect TEM to improve your operations regardless of your industry.
Inventory Management
One of the primary reasons to invest in TEM is to improve all of your data tracking. That applies to on-hand inventory as much as anything else. When you get more advanced methods of tracking the input and output of your inventory, it leads to much more than a simple optimization of your budget.
TEM can help make inventory management more efficient. You can reduce labor and other resources poured into the task. You can also better avoid supply shortages and surpluses. Controlling inventory impacts every aspect of a business, so naturally, improving inventory management is going to help overall operations.
Resource Allocation
Inventory management showcases a few examples of how TEM can improve your resource allocation, but the benefits are far more general. Resources include money, labor hours, raw resources and anything else that you can take away from one task and invest in another. Far beyond the scope of inventory, TEM looks at overall resource allocation.
If you’re losing time on inefficient communication, a TEM audit highlights the problem and offers cost-effective solutions. If you’re investing money on software solutions that aren’t actually being used, you can cancel the subscriptions and spend that money on something that actually generates a return. Resource allocation lies at the heart and soul of TEM, and it’s the key to improving operations from the smallest minutia to major changes.
Contract Negotiation
Better managing your resources is inevitably going to empower you to make positive adjustments across your business. Contract negotiation is a perfect example. When you go through a TEM audit, you find exactly how much benefit you net from different vendor contracts. Seeing everything in clear, concise numbers will empower your contract negotiations more than anything else.
Every item that isn’t a clear benefit can be leveraged against the cost of your contracts or traded for a service that might better serve your interest. Every item that shows success can steer you towards contracts that will add to your operations by leaps and bounds. It’s pretty straightforward, and even less-hawkish negotiators will find contract negotiation much easier when they utilize TEM services.
Future Planning
Planning for the future doesn’t improve your operations today, but there’s no escaping the fact that businesses have to adapt all the time. TEM aids future planning by helping you see exactly how your myriad decisions proliferate throughout your operations. You can improve your understanding of the mechanical trade-offs in your operations, and that will help you completely re-imagine future planning.
Anticipating changes, improving freedom and flexibility and selecting technology upgrades all benefit from TEM. You can reduce downtime when you have to implement changes and overhauls, and most importantly, you can ensure that your budget is always prepared for the endless changes that will inevitably face your operations.
Telecom expense management is so much more than a spreadsheet of spending. It’s a data-rich, analytical outlook on every investment and return you make within the confines of your business. When you use the resource, it’s impossible not to improve your operations.
Network security is still one of the most important and most challenging aspects of running a modern business. Sensitive data is everywhere, and there are a lot of nefarious groups that can make huge money from stealing it. Chances are that you’ve already made some pretty big investments to protect your business from such leaks, but there’s a major issue that is overlooked by most companies today: encryption gaps.
WHAT IS AN ENCRYPTION GAP?
Most of the time, networks and transmitted data are protected by encryption. It prevents third parties from being able to steal any information in transit, and it’s vital to defending against data breaches and network intrusion. Encryption gaps refer to holes in this security that typically arise from overall practices rather than failing technology.
In many, many cases, encryption gaps occur during IT transitions. Replacing lots of equipment or rapidly expanding networks leaves plenty of opportunities for mistakes and oversights that can create these little holes in security. Specific transition tend to leave more vulnerabilities than others. Simply replacing a router usually doesn’t come with any security leaks. Instead, migrations to the cloud, implementation of IoT and expanding personal device access are the most common practices that come with encryption gaps.
IOT
IoT is actually the number one source of encryption gaps. This is true across the globe and industries. It mostly boils down to the fact that encrypting transmissions from every single IoT device is a more challenging problem to solve. The result is huge holes in network security.
A recent study by Zscaler (a cloud security firm) found that over 90 percent of IoT transactions are unsecured. Only 1 in 10 transactions has any security at all on it. That’s a huge problem. Many IoT networks feel they can get away with this because the IoT section is segregated. While that offers some protection, those unsecured devices can have data stolen, and badly motivated individuals could even alter data within those networks with no detection at all.
Securing large-scale IoT systems is no easy challenge, but it’s a problem that has to be solved if you want to keep your data secure.
THE OTHER GAPING HOLE
Any migration can present opportunities for encryption gaps, but common practices like cloud migration have a lot of redundant measures in place. True cloud experts have a systematic approach that can mitigate the problem.
Instead, the IoT problem shows us where most enterprise networks have soft spots: personal devices. It’s practically impossible to keep employees from utilizing their own devices at work, but this represents a massive security problem. Even though most personal devices have plenty of security baked into their use, having so many endpoints in a network makes a data breach something of an inevitability.
Stolen personal devices have been responsible for data breaches at major companies like Coca Cola, virtually every leak at Apple and countless other expensive cases.
HOW MUCH IT COSTS
Vulnerabilities are everywhere, and they have to be taken seriously. Data breaches are now the most expensive IT issue for most corporations. A study in July 2018 found that the average, global cost of a data breach (across all industries) is $3.86 million. In the US, that average jumps up to $7.91 million. That’s more than $150 per leaked record. It’s not a cost any company should tolerate.
PROTECTIVE MEASURES
The good news is that there are solutions to all of these problems. They key to a safe cloud migration is to verify the cloud encryption before moving important data. It’s an easy concept, but it isn’t always simple in practice. That’s where experience comes to play.
For IoT, network segregation is already the best first step. It’s entirely possible to keep the entire IoT network in an intranet. Securing data retrieved from such an intranet is much simpler.
As for the issue of personal devices, it’s the most challenging. Regular training on best practices for employees will always go a long way. When possible, running everything through a server/cloud system is even better. If sensitive data is never permanently stored on personal devices, there is less risk of a leak.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and that applies to securing your networks as much as anything else. When you consider the cost of a data breach, it’s easy to see when security upgrades are worth the cost.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: JEFF POIRIOR
Jeff brings 25 years of telecommunications and information technology management experience in voice and data networking, server support, and telephony and security; with a significant emphasis on customer service. Prior to joining Valicom, he was chief of the infrastructure support section for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. Jeff was the vice president of operations for CC&N, overseeing telecommunications, help desk, data and desk side support services. Prior to that, he served as the associate director of technical resources for Covance, responsible for managing systems and network operations supporting 1700 users in Wisconsin and Virginia. He has also led data center operations at Magnetek Electric, supporting mainframe systems, client/server applications, telephony systems, and computer-aided design. Jeff holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Cardinal Stritch University and a master’s degree in business administration from University of Phoenix. In addition, Jeff is a past board member of the Wisconsin Telecommunication Association.