After DLA Piper’s Australian arm merged with the international firm in 2011 it noticed a sharp increase in mobile roaming costs, which were difficult to control. The business now saves AUS$202,000 annually. This is how.
Profile
DLA Piper is a leading global law firm helping companies with their legal needs anywhere in world. Their clients include more than half of the Fortune 250 and nearly half of the FTSE 350. The Australian part of the business merged with the international firm in 2011, which saw international travel in the Asia Pacific become an integral part of doing business.
Challenge
After the merger, the company noticed an escalation in mobile roaming costs due to increased international travel requirements. These costs were, naturally, difficult to control.
With individual monthly mobile bills reaching thousands of dollars, the biggest challenge for DLA Piper was that their mobile carriers could provide very little detail or visibility into how these costs were being incurred, making it difficult to identify potential cost saving measures.
“We had no visibility into what was generating the data component of those costs. We could only present a bill to an employee and ask them what contributed to the final cost.” said Dylan James, Head of IT – Australia, DLA Piper.
Solution
As part of a review of the business’ mobile fleet, the team at DLA Piper spoke to their local carrier Optus about services that could manage their growing mobility costs.
“At the time, the UK firm was already using a different data cost savings service and it was hoped that other regions, including Australia, could adopt the same. Local carriers, however, could not support the UK solution and Optus strongly recommended Wandera instead. This turned out to be a very good choice. It gave us the visibility into data usage that we needed, and the UK firm has since adopted Wandera also,” said James.
Although DLA Piper didn’t have an MDM that could push Wandera to its devices, the manual deployment process was a very quick and easy one.
DLA Piper decided to keep the policy settings in Wandera as simple as they could with only two variations – a more rigid policy for roaming users and a more generous one for domestic users, with no exceptions. That way, employees understand that their mobile usage is restricted by company-wide policy to which everyone complies.
“For roaming users, we set usage caps and configured policies that allow access to anything that we know is work related, such as work email, our systems or our mobile application fleet. We disallow access to other non-work related services when users are on a 3G or 4G network.”
“We can now let employees go overseas with international roaming enabled and feel confident they won’t come back with a large unexpected bill. We can also have alerts and updates sent to their phones to let them know how they are going with their data usage in real-time,” continued James.
Wandera has also helped DLA Piper employees to understand and be more responsible with their own mobile data usage.
“People are quite surprised when they receive alerts about their data usage. You can show them how non-work related usage compares to work related usage, and sometimes that’s a big eye opener for people. This also deters any requests for a higher data allowance.”
Results
DLA Piper has achieved an 85% reduction in roaming data consumption, which equates to a significant annual saving. Wandera has also been actively blocking mobile threats across their fleet of devices.
“We have come to a point where our monthly bills have almost flatlined, I can predict month-to-month what the mobile bill will be, regardless of who’s travelling and what they are doing. That’s never happened before.”
With Wandera active on their devices in Australia and keen to share their positive experience internationally with their peers, DLA Piper set up licenses for their teams overseas.
“Wandera was happy to support us with expansion of the service. We asked to work with new carriers in Asia or the Middle East and within 24 hours, we’d have Wandera up and running with the new carrier. I’ve been impressed with their quick response and their ability to accommodate our needs.”