Johannesburg, 05 May 2017
execMobile (www.execmobile.co.za) announced today an analysis of the roaming traffic of business people travelling abroad, and found three-quarters of all wireless data is used on business-related activities, but less than 1% of the data is securely encrypted.
Businesses have long complained about the very high international roaming fees incurred by travellers. execMobile's analysis shows only 24% of the data is used on leisure activities, such as checking social media sites, watching movies and listening to music. So, while there might be room for cost reductions, these services might be considered part of travel costs for executives away from home.
Nearly 33% of the traffic, while classified as "Web browsing", is use of Web sites and portals such as Google Maps, Uber, Salesforce and other travel-related Web sites. Again, these services are now essential tools of a mobile workforce, dependent on accessing services and data while mobile.
What should be of concern to enterprises is that, while travellers may have access to corporate VPNs that encrypted their communications on their laptops, 99% of mobile business data is not secure, leaving the businesses vulnerable to hacking. This is because most mobile traffic is generated from phones and tablets, which have no corporate VPN protection. Only 1% of mobile data was tunnelled, despite widespread security concerns about hotel and public WiFi.
The analysis draws on execMobile's data from 150+ businesses, ranging in size from small businesses to large global corporations. Tens of terabytes of data was analysed to understand the business travellers' data usage habits.
Additional insights include:
* A third (32%) of the traffic was generated by a combination of network storage and bulk transfers (includes automated backups, updates and data transfers to or from cloud storage).
* The average daily usage per PocketWifi device was 168MB.
* There was an average of 2.8 devices connected per PocketWifi (either multiple devices or users).
The data generated by execMobile's PocketWifi devices indicated average daily usage was surprisingly low, at around 50MB per connected device.
Data usage classification
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