IT is the backbone of every business. Without a strong and robust IT team that can maintain a high level of performance and reliability, business can suffer due to a lack of employee productivity, decreases in customer satisfaction, and overall poor performance.
However, even given its critical nature, the reality is IT is a huge expenditure for many businesses and there are often ways to reduce the IT budget without sacrificing digital experience, employee productivity, or customer satisfaction. The tricky part is determining where exactly those cuts can be made and where to start.
In this blog, we’ll provide three tips on reducing your IT costs: how to identify the right devices to upgrade, the importance of IT budgeting, and an IT cost reduction checklist.
Identify the right devices to upgrade
The first step to optimizing IT costs is to evaluate your existing infrastructure. This evaluation will help you determine which devices need to be upgraded or replaced.
Here are three tips to help you identify the right devices to upgrade:
- Extend the life of devices: While many businesses will replace devices based on their age, you can save money by focusing on device performance. Sometimes older devices are still performing well and don’t have to be replaced, this can result in huge device cost savings.
- Right size employee devices: Ensure you are providing your employees with appropriately powered devices. When refreshing your employee devices, evaluate their needs, if an employee is primarily using light applications, they may not need a high-powered device. On the other hand, an employee that spends their day using resource intensive applications will need a device that can support their use-case.
- Identify poorly performing devices: Like extending the life of older devices that are still performing well, some newer devices may not be performing as well as expected. By identifying these devices, you may be able to proactively fix performance issues to save on expenses.
Importance of IT budgeting
Once you have identified the devices that need to be upgraded, the next step is to develop an IT budget. IT budgeting is critical to managing IT costs effectively.
Here are a few key benefits of IT budgeting:
- Optimize software licenses: Evaluate the software you use and the licenses you have. It is possible that you are paying for licenses that aren’t being used, employees are using redundant software, or shadow IT applications are increasing your software costs.
- Assess network infrastructure: Assess the network infrastructure and determine where bottlenecks are occurring. This assessment will help you identify areas where you can either upgrade or streamline network infrastructure to reduce bandwidth costs.
- Evaluate cloud spend: Cloud costs can rise quickly as you move to cloud-native or hybrid cloud environments. It’s critical you closely examine and understand the bills coming from your cloud provider and take steps to minimize unnecessary cloud traffic.
- Prioritize spending: Identify the areas of IT investment that will provide the most ROI and focus on those spending areas first. Measure the impact of planned and ongoing changes on things like the digital experience, application performance, device health, and network performance to ensure you are getting the most bang for your buck.
IT cost reduction checklist
To help you reduce IT costs, follow this quick checklist to get started:
- Align IT with business goals: Ensure your IT investments align with business goals, enabling you to optimize IT costs while driving business growth.
- Determine a device refresh strategy: Identify the devices that need to be replaced, which ones can be fixed, and which ones can continue being used.
- Identify savings opportunities: Look for ways to save on existing spend in areas like software licenses, cloud usage, and network bandwidth.
- Automate IT processes: Automate IT processes to reduce manual labor and increase efficiency.
In conclusion, reducing IT costs is critical for every business, and the key is to optimize IT infrastructure while minimizing unnecessary expenses.
If you would like a more in-depth view of how to reduce your IT asset costs read our guide, Budget Getting Tight? How to Reduce IT Costs Without Sacrificing User Experience.