New Total Economic Impact Study of Absolute’s Endpoint Visibility & Control Platform Shows 146 Percent Return on Investment Over Three Years

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — March 15, 2018 — Absolute (TSX: ABT), the endpoint visibility and control company, today released a new commissioned Forrester Consulting study quantifying the Total Economic Impact and benefits of the Absolute platform. Forrester found that organizations that use Absolute to manage and secure their endpoints could obtain a return on investment (ROI) of up to 146 percent over three years . In addition, the study revealed that organizations that use Absolute platform and its firmware-embedded Persistence technology could expect to receive $3.5 million in value over three years, with the technology beginning to pay back its users for their investment within only six months.

Research shows that companies struggle to maintain visibility and control over their endpoints, especially as global workforces conduct business remotely and cyber threats continue to grow at an alarming pace. The key challenge is the dark endpoint—those devices that are off the network, vulnerable to attack, operating with broken security controls or simply out of compliance.

“Even the most well-prepared and well-funded IT security organizations struggle to see and manage their entire ecosystem of endpoints,” said Steve Munford, Interim Chief Executive Officer at Absolute. “Endpoints are always on the move, security controls break far too easily, and many go dark when they fall off of the network. Businesses are looking for automated and effective ways to track, manage and secure endpoints in order to reduce business risk and save money. By implementing Absolute, we can help customers turn dark endpoints into resilient endpoints.”

Forrester’s results reveal significant cost savings for those managing IT help desk or incident response issues. Among the potential operational efficiency benefits, Forrester found the following:

• Companies can save more than $2 million while improving IT asset management, lifecycle planning and compliance audits for regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS);
• Security organizations can reduce operations costs by an average of $393,904 over three years and cut 12 minutes per incident response with the transparency and visibility provided by Absolute’s platform;
• IT help desk staff can save $140,680 in three years by improving productivity and efficiency. These teams cut 10 minutes from each case as a result of the insight and automation enabled by Absolute; and
• Organizations are able to reduce lost or stolen assets with Absolute’s ability to provide visibility over dark endpoints, for another $939,060 in cost savings.

The Total Economic Impact™ Of Absolute study was developed through extensive research into five of Absolute’s long-term customers. By using this research to create a composite organization, Forrester calculated both the quantifiable and the unquantified benefits from actual use of the Absolute platform.

According to one of those customers, an InfoSec manager at a corporate legal services company: “There’s nothing else out there that gives us that complete visibility of our devices. Knowing that as much as we protect our data — should the devices disappear, we know that there’s that degree of safety by going back to our client and saying, ‘The data has been wiped; you don’t need to worry.’”