Australian businesses are always looking to reduce IT costs, especially in the current challenging economic climate. Here are 4 ways to save money on IT without compromising on business IT performance and quality.
4 Ways To Reduce IT costs
1. Embrace the Cloud
For businesses still relying on traditional on-premises infrastructure, moving some or all applications and data to the cloud can provide significant cost savings for maintenance, support, security and staffing. Cloud-based services are also predictable budget items as they are usually billed as a set monthly fee.
Cloud services can also deliver other benefits to small to medium businesses like access to new technology and scaling that they couldn’t otherwise afford.
However, migrating to the cloud should be approached with caution and ideally undertaken under the banner of an IT strategy to ensure your business chooses the most effective and cost-effective solutions so that cloud spending is optimised.
2. Align Business Goals and Technology Strategy
Aligning your business goals with your IT needs offers you the ability to adopt and implement technology that can help achieve your business objectives, and lead to lower costs without damaging business operations. It can also reduce the risk of spending on speculative projects that may be costly and ineffective.
Detailed planning across your organisation, careful budgeting, and a clear understanding of your business goals will help discern precisely which business objectives need to be met, and how technology can support them.
Prioritise adapting your IT to meet these business-critical objectives, and postpone or scrap non-critical and expensive solutions that aren’t essential to help drive IT savings.
If your business doesn’t have the internal expertise, there are IT companies that can help you develop your IT strategy, align it with your business goals, and successfully implement new technologies.
3. Proactive Maintenance
‘Prevention is better than the cure’ can be applied to many aspects of life, and technology is no exception.
It may seem counter intuitive to pay an external IT provider to conduct IT health checks and proactive maintenance to help reduce costs. However, if an expert can identify business critical issues and perform regular maintenance as required, this can greatly reduce IT costs over the lifetime of IT applications and hardware.
It can also identify potentially business-cripling issues before they become an emergency, and provide advice on new technologies that you may be unaware of.
4. Outsource
Outsourcing can be a great way to reduce costs for small to medium sized businesses, especially with the shift to cloud technology, as we’ve already discussed.
A managed service provider can host, manage and support your IT needs more efficiently, flexibly and cost-effectively than many businesses can accomplish in-house.
Managed IT services allows a business to incur fixed and manageable expenses rather than shoulder the burden of internal IT management, large capital expenditure and hefty IT staff salaries.
As well as outsourcing staff, businesses can outsource numerous components of infrastructure including backup and recovery, business continuity and disaster recovery, and cyber security, at a set and affordable price.
In Conclusion – Consult an expert
IT management and costs are something that all Australian businesses must contend with. If your business lacks the internal expertise or capacity to manage your own IT, you’d be wise to engage a managed IT services company such as Surety IT.
Surety IT is a Brisbane-based IT Support, IT Services and IT Strategy company, offering an extensive range of services for small to medium businesses that take the hassle out of IT.
From IT helpdesk services to providing temporary CIO consulting or expert IT strategy, Surety IT can provide customised and cost-effective solutions to help you reach your business goals.
Contact Surety IT today to find out more about how we can help reduce the cost of IT in your business.
