5 ways in which you’re wasting your tech budget

Looking for ways to free up some extra cash in your IT budget next financial year? Here are 5 ideas that might contain the answer.

Rethink Private Cloud

Now you might be thinking, “Whoa, what? How is security of information and guaranteed sovereignty over our data a waste of money?”

True, those are genuine business case points for the adoption of private cloud, as part of a hybrid cloud arrangement, but if you’re arguing for private cloud just because of the feel-good factor surrounding those point, chances are that you’re wasting money.

Deploying your own resources and creating your own cloud or taking out space on a Managed Service provider’s infrastructure solely for the sake of feeling good about your private access to your data doesn’t go hand in hand with the economic advantages of public cloud offerings and doesn’t take into account their secure offerings.

Think about some of the activity that you’re undertaking. Spinning up test servers for R&D purposes for just a week or two, publishing a public-facing website, or crunching huge datasets (containing de-personalised data) are all instances of workloads that can be handled by public cloud, with less maintenance overhead for your internal team and lower cost of ownership.

The key is in thinking about how to manage what workload and where.

Get better at archiving

We live in a world where access is ubiquitous. We’re used to being able to uncover anything we have ever written almost instantly. But that ability comes at a cost in the age of cloud computing.

Realistically, how often do you need to find a document that you authored 3 years ago? Does it need to be instantly available on a server that is bulging at the seams, storing everything your company has ever created and which has to be upgraded every 24 months to a new, heroic level of storage? Or could you benefit by investing in an archiving solution that is still reasonably fast, but not instantaneous?

Choosing to stop paying too much for long-term storage and instant availability when you should be archiving to tape and a long-term storage option is one of the easier decisions to make that will end up saving many thousands of dollars.

Add more discrimination to your workplace

Not the kind you might be thinking about. We’re suggesting that you become more discriminating before your next hardware refresh.

Buying the same middle-of-the-range desktop PC for everyone means that your power users are stuck using unproductive hardware. They’ll waste more than the value of the powerful option they should have received waiting for their PC to catch up.

Likewise, there will be some users who can get by with a lesser spec because of the nature of their work. You’ll pay more for their solution than you need to. Everyone is not created equal when it comes to hardware and picking the safe middle option in terms of performance can be surprisingly costly.

Too many low-level on-site resources

Do you really need someone on-site who can react to your team’s low-level support requests instantly? If so, then how many such resources do you need? What happens when they’re all busy and someone else needs help?

We solve more than 90% of our clients’ requests over the phone, email and chat because all of a user’s problems at Level 1 can be solved remotely. Password resets, application troubleshooting, new user creation, phone configuration, file retrieval, email problems and more are all examples of support that can be delivered from the other side of a city just as well as a warm body at your desk.

And if you’re paying your staff overtime on after-hours requests for help, you’re really wasting your money. You can get all of that and more from a Managed Service provider for less than the cost of a dedicated staff member. And then you don’t have to worry about their availability after 6pm or when they’re on holiday or when they take sick leave or what will happen if they switch jobs

So perhaps rethink your approach to support and you might just save yourself many thousands.

Review your licenses

The last time we conducted a review for a client’s licensing arrangements, we were able to save them thousands of dollars in fees they were paying simply because they had lost track of what was a legitimate expense. Guess what? A software vendor does not want to tell you that you’re not using your licenses and could probably let them lapse – they’ll just keep billing you for them.

Along with a license review to compare what you’re paying for to what you actually need, should come a review of your onboarding and offboarding procedures where software is provisioned and eventually removed. How well do your procedures for offboarding capture the software that was being consumed and ensure that you are no longer charged for it?

A simple tweak to policies and some enforcement will generate big long-term savings.

For even more ideas on how to save money in your IT budget, get in touch. You can reach us on 1300 667 871 or via this page.