The cost of lack of endpoint visibility

Tanium has released findings of a study that highlights the potential savings that public and private sector European organisations could realise by improving endpoint visibility and control across their IT estates.

This comes at a time when endpoint visibility and management is crucial as organisations deal with issues such as mass remote working and the increasing frequency of ransomware attacks. To effectively address these challenges, organisations need to have a high level of cyber hygiene in place. A fundamental aspect of this is endpoint visibility so that weak points in IT infrastructure can be identified and action taken to remediate them. However, this visibility is often delivered by multiple, ineffective tools, meaning that many organisations have an opportunity to improve efficiencies and reduce costs.

Key findings include:

• UK organisations that fail to implement comprehensive endpoint management technology risk losing out on significant cost savings. UK organisations are estimated to save on average a total of £995,120 in their first year of using endpoint technology, followed by an additional £343,463 in year two and £517,817 in year three.

• Businesses losing largest amount of savings because of under-managed assets. UK organisations are missing out on an average of £338,163 in savings after just one year due to under-managed assets, specifically. Endpoints that are poorly managed are more vulnerable to cyber threats and cause more incidents, making them more expensive to support. This is the area of endpoint management that offers organisations the largest value, closely followed by threat detection (£268,026) and endpoint security (£249,791) —both of which begin to generate savings after three years of using the technology. 

• Full benefits of the technology realised after three years of implementation. The rising value of savings is due to improved efficiency and insight gained in areas such as patch management and threat detection, which can save UK businesses an average of £174,854 and £268,026 after two and three years respectively. These benefits become more evident after full endpoint visibility and control has been in place for over a year.

• Enterprises are missing out on higher cost savings compared to public sector organisations. Private sector organisations in the UK could experience an average three-year cost savings of £2,351,834, compared to £995,910 for those in the public sector. This is likely to be, because public sector organisations have fewer endpoints connected to their network in comparison to the private sector, where employees are more likely to work from multiple devices.

• Organisations in the Nordics are forgoing the largest potential savings across Europe. The study revealed that Nordic organisations were estimated to save on average £5,631,240 over three years, the highest of any country/region studied. This is closely followed by France (£4,255,899), Benelux (£2,303,492), the UK (£1,856,400) and Germany (£1,444,571).

The study analysed 132 large organisations across EMEA, with an average employee count of 39,202. These organisations are from a variety of industries including financial services, entertainment, automotive, retail and the public sector.

“The shift to mass remote working during the pandemic marked an end to traditional network perimeters,” said Chris Vaughan, Area Vice President of Technical Account Management – EMEA, Tanium. “You can’t protect what you can’t see – so for organisations to operate safely under these new conditions and secure their IT infrastructure, they need clear visibility of all devices connected to their networks. Our data shows that this can lead to large financial savings across a number of areas in IT, but it also provides a level of certainty about endpoints that will give organisations increased peace of mind about the resilience of their IT estates.”