Businesses have always needed to use their available resources efficiently, but it has perhaps never been as important for them to squeeze as much value out of what they have. To further this end, let’s go over a few ways that you can more intelligently reduce your IT budget in the short-term.
Review, Identify, and Parse
First thing’s first: you need to go over all your IT investments and related accounts to find any redundancies or excesses that exist—as well as identify any line items that can be put on hold for the time being.
For instance, the balance between your use of in-house solutions and cloud-based solutions. While too much investment into unnecessary cloud resources can hurt you, totally ignoring the cloud is equally detrimental. Finding the happy medium for your company’s operations will help you to optimize your invested costs, as well as single out those that are no longer needed. For instance, if you switched over to a new software, a few of the old titles could still be active on your network and slowly costing your business money.
Of course, whenever possible, you should simply suspend—not canceling outright—your investments wherever possible to reduce the amount you must pay. This makes it far more convenient to re-up your services as needed. This is where cloud services prove their value over an onsite hardware option in many situations.
Switch to Cost-Effective Options
In a similar vein, it never hurts to examine your cloud investments and consider if another provider would be able to give you a better deal for a comparable price. When it comes to such solutions, price comparison is always an intelligent strategy to take.
From cloud-based software suites to single-purpose platforms, such solutions can offer relatively low up-front prices and are billed monthly. This means that if you have no need for one of them at some point or need less or more than you have at the time, you can adjust your use accordingly.
In terms of your hardware investments, Bring-Your-Own-Device policies can help bring these down while simultaneously boosting employee engagement by encouraging your team members to use the devices they are likely most comfortable with.
Understand Which Costs are Fixed, and Which Can Vary
Many ongoing expenses are going to remain somewhat consistent over time—things like rent, payroll, and similar spending. These are the ones that you should consider eliminating, as they can’t really be scaled back. Variable costs can be, so things that are priced differently based on volume or frequency should be scaled back if possible.
By establishing your baseline operational needs and evaluating the necessity of any costs that exceed this baseline, you can greatly benefit your budget during tough economic times.
Business Solutions & Software Group and our scalable solutions can help you to accomplish this. Many of our services are dedicated to optimizing the IT budget you have available, and some could even help make your funds more productive. For more information, give our team a call at (954) 575-3992 today.
