Member Article

Getting more value from your IT budget

One of the most common questions business owners ask themselves is what do we get for our IT spend?

Regardless of the economic climate, all businesses need to keep a close eye on costs. But cost optimisation is not about simply slashing budgets. A better approach is to switch the focus from cost to value. From a simple IT health check to full scale rationalisation and restructure, an IT partner with high end, cross-sector experience can guide you towards reducing cost and improving efficiency across all areas of IT.

Your key drivers should be to align your IT to your business strategy, reduce spend where possible, improve efficiency within the existing model, and re-architect the infrastructure. Here are some points to consider:

Communications – if you are using a ‘too good to be true’ cheap provider for your connectivity but staff are having trouble logging on to systems, processing data or struggling with slow internet connections, it is false economy. Cheap deals often involve slow download rates, which you do not find out about until the day you have an interruption in service and need to restore systems and data from a backup. At that moment your ‘great’ deal may have just cost you your business.

A move to high speed communications can prompt an upturn in productivity and improvements in customer service. Look for a deal that includes low latency, which means just milliseconds between a piece of data leaving one location and arriving in another, whether that is across your premises or half way around the world. This is vital in sectors where massive amounts of data are processed such as law, manufacturing or digital.

Virtualisation – virtual rather than physical hardware will cut your energy and space needs and allow you to scale your computing power up or down alongside the business, meaning you are not paying for technology you do not need.

Lower investment – look at options for moving some of your systems into the cloud, which simply describes secure business services delivered via the internet. You do not have to go 100% cloud to benefit from new technologies, when models can be created that combine holding your hardware on and off-premise, based on a mix of public, private and hybrid cloud.

Instead of buying IT, you are buying services and moving from a capex to an opex model means you are no longer locked into a cycle of constant investment in hardware and software. You also have the reassurance of always having the best technology available, and upgrades become quick and easy.

Location – if your hardware and software is located on your own site you will know how much need space, power and effort it consumes. Organisations who use high security data centres such as our ISO27001-certified centres in the North East, which include workspace recovery seats, are buying into our investment in facilities, network and know-how that will support their business growth. ‘An extension of our own organisation, at a fraction of the cost and without the risk’, as one of our clients describes it.

Unified communications – consider switching from a standard phone system to unified communications, which pulls together data, voice and images into one efficient and cost-effective stream.

Support – create the right support model by identifying what your in-house resource can cover, and plug any gaps with a managed services or outsourcing partner. They can handle some, or all of your needs from strategic consultancy through to implementation and technical support.

Market forces and technology advances have pushed costs down making an unprecedented range of tools and functionality available at cost-effective rates, allowing even the smallest of SMEs to buy into high end connectivity and services.

Our advice is to seek out an IT partner who can help you refocus your budget across all areas of your ICT. Call us for a free IT health check and a chat about how you can make sure your budget really delivers.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by ITPS Ltd .