Decrease Your IT Budget While Still Moving Forward

Of all the vital expenditures companies make – overhead, employees and materials – money spent on IT solutions are right at the top of tools that boost efficiency. With so many tech options available, it is easy for IT budgets to go through the roof. No company wants to be left behind while competitors are adding the latest and greatest equipment, so how do business owners keep making progress without sapping the overall budget? Here are some suggestions for smart money management.

Set Priorities

This should be the first step IT managers take when looking to curb costs. Fixed spending is the easiest place to know exactly how much a department can save. By going through the list and taking vital expenditures off the cutting block, then re-prioritizing the remaining buckets, managers have the ability to locate a significant chunk of savings. Of course, it’s vital that the costs that are considered indispensable are managed in an optimal way.

Skip the Servers

Servers wear out or become insufficient over time, and that means a risk of data loss and significant downtime. One the simplest ways to cut budgets it to eliminate serves – and their maintenance and storage costs – and move to the cloud or other virtual data storage option. Not only are there savings to be had on hardware, backups can be much simpler and less machinery is going into the waste stream.

Look to Assets

Rather than tossing old laptops or cables, consider re-purposing them. If they are still relatively new, the hardware can be updated, or, at the very least, they can be wiped and sold online. Cables that need some TLC can be fixed and reused. Consider using old desktop computers to create a network that can work on large jobs in the background with little input.

Go Green

There are several different ways to do this. Managers could choose to buy used machines instead of purchasing new. There is some risk involved with this approach, but if a knowledgeable IT staff is on duty, they should be able to deal with problems as they arise. If the budget ever increases in the future, new equipment can replace the used items. That presents another opportunity to go green: all new equipment purchases should be machines that maximize energy use. Green machines save money on electricity as well as earning the company potential tax credits.

Lose the Licensing

Many companies find licensing fees to be a big budget buster. Who wants to help giant, wealthy software companies make even more money? Fortunately, there are a lot of high-quality open source options that can help businesses ditch those fees. Open source can be customized to exact specifications, which can increase efficiency. Besides, open source is where all the innovation is happening these days, because it is not stymied by the limitations of the massive corporation.

Any company or organization that needs to shave some dollars from the budget can use these strategies without fear of moving backward in terms of IT progress. To learn more about creative ways to maximize funds, visit www.bbctechnologysolutions.com today!

Share this page on:
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn