BYOD May Breed Mobile-Budget-Draining "Zombie Phones"

Companies that have 500 to 50,000 mobile lines may have "zombie phones," a moniker used by mobile device management vendor Amtel to denote mobile devices that are thought to have been disconnected but are still being billed by the carrier every month. As corporate mobile phones are increasingly being replaced by worker-owned devices, corporate billing from carriers may not cease and continue to eat away at a company's tech budget.

"When we were analyzing companies' mobile networks, we were finding that they had a certain ratio of phones that they thought had been disconnected, but those lines were actually alive," Amtel CEO Pankaj Gupta said.

In fact, during an audit of mobile devices for a multinational biotech firm, Amtel discovered that two percent of the mobile phones were zombie phones costing the company a yearly bill of $70,000.

According to Amtel, the oversight can happen in two ways:

One, many companies allow employees who are leaving the organization to keep their phones. The financial liability is then transferred from the corporate account to the soon-to-be ex-employee's personal account. However, around 10 percent of the time, the financial-liability transfer fails to happen and the company keeps getting invoiced by the carrier.

And two, zombie phones may arise from employees having to turn over their mobile phones to HR or IT upon leaving the company. The carrier is then alerted to terminate the services associated with the phones. The devices are stored and subsequently forgotten. But around 10 percent of the time, the service does not get terminated and continues to eat away at the company's mobile budget.

CIO's Tom Kaneshige also pointed out another instance when a BYOD policy leads to a possible doubling of cost for a BYOD phone. This can happen when a company gives its worker a stipend for BYOD, and such stipend appears automatically in the paycheck-in order to avoid the hidden cost of expense report processing.

Amtel recommends a strong mobile device management (MDM) system to avoid the costly oversight associated with zombie phones, as well as to manage the security of BYOD devices. (KOM) Link. Link.