Mobile Security: The Missing Piece in an SMB’s IT Strategy

Time to read

4 minutes

Author

Alex Mawson, Product Portfolio
Director at Giacom

Date published

September 2026

It’s easy to understand why. If a cyber incident stops a business operating, every other priority, from productivity and customer service to growth, suddenly becomes secondary.

But there’s a potential gap in many security strategies. One of the devices employees use most often can still be treated very differently from the laptop sitting on their desk.

Mobile Security

The smartphone is effectively a PC in your pocket. It provides access to email, Microsoft 365, Teams, customer information and business applications, and it may also be the device used to authenticate access to other systems. There are around 12.5 million mobile handsets deployed within UK businesses, yet mobile is still commonly bought and managed separately from the wider IT estate.

The gap isn’t just in how mobile is bought and managed. It’s also visible in security policy. The Department for Science, Innovation & Technology’s 2025/26 Cyber Security Breaches Survey found that just 36% of UK businesses have a formal cybersecurity policy. Even among those that do, only 68% cover remote or mobile working, while 58% address employees using their own devices for business.

That doesn’t mean every business outside those figures is leaving mobile completely unprotected, but it does suggest there’s a gap between how people now work and how consistently those risks are being managed.

Nobody would knowingly leave a business laptop unmanaged because it happened to be used away from the office. Yet smartphones travel everywhere with their users, connect over networks the business doesn’t control and can be lost or stolen far more easily. A convincing phishing message or unsafe application can expose the same business data and systems that an MSP may already be working hard to protect elsewhere.

There’s a growing market around closing that gap. According to Analysys Mason’s SMB Technology Forecaster, the UK mobile security and device management market is valued at around $415 million. For MSPs, though, I think the more interesting opportunity is how naturally mobile fits with services many already provide.

If you’re managing Microsoft 365 for a customer, for example, the same employee using those cloud services is probably accessing them from a smartphone too. Microsoft 365 Business Premium already includes Microsoft Intune for managing devices and applications, alongside Defender for Business for endpoint protection.

That creates a natural starting point for a conversation about how mobile devices are enrolled, configured and protected. Other security technologies, including products such as Bitdefender, can add further protection depending on the customer’s requirements.

From there, the opportunity can become broader.

An MSP could bring device management, endpoint security, mobile hardware, support and airtime together as one managed service. For the customer, the outcome is fairly simple: their mobile estate is protected and managed alongside the rest of their technology, with one provider taking responsibility for making it work.

That reflects what SMBs increasingly want from technology providers more generally. Analysys Mason’s research points towards customers wanting greater simplicity, clearer accountability and technology that’s delivered and managed as an ongoing service rather than a collection of disconnected products.

There’s a commercial benefit for the provider too. You don’t need to supply the airtime for mobile security or device management to work. But if you’re already trusted to secure and manage the device, there’s a logical opportunity to ask why the connectivity itself is still being bought somewhere else. Combining multiple products can also give you more commercial flexibility in how you build and price the overall proposition.

Mobile airtime can provide attractive recurring margins, while bringing it into the managed service reduces the number of suppliers around the customer. More importantly, it allows you to build a proposition around the employee rather than around individual technologies: the applications they use, the device they work from, the security protecting it and the connectivity keeping them online.

That’s easier to describe than it can be to deliver, particularly for MSPs that know cloud and security well but haven’t traditionally sold mobile. Different tariffs, commercial models and provisioning processes can make adding airtime feel like more complexity than it’s worth.

That’s the problem Giacom’s MSP Mobile proposition and Partner Enablement programme are designed to address. We can help providers understand the mobile opportunity within their existing customer base, train their teams and support individual sales opportunities where extra mobile expertise is needed. MSP Mobile also gives cloud-focused providers a simpler route to bringing airtime alongside Microsoft, security, devices and other services they already manage.

Mobile security doesn’t need to be another standalone product to sell. It can be the missing piece that makes an existing security service more complete, and the starting point for a wider, more valuable managed mobile relationship.