Most companies have limited funds to spend on their IT environments. Decision-makers must often make difficult choices regarding the computing systems and applications employed to support business operations. Ideally, an organization can construct an infrastructure that efficiently addresses business requirements and meets customer expectations while staying within budget guidelines.
Reaching this ideal situation can be very challenging. Companies need to find ways to stretch the IT budget without degrading performance or affecting customer satisfaction. They also must take the necessary steps to remain competitive or risk losing business to market rivals. The goal is to obtain the most value from current IT investments and identify new ways to address business objectives while cutting costs.
Methods of Optimizing Your IT Budget
Following are tips and strategies that can help organizations optimize their IT budget and save money that can be invested in other areas of the business.
Assess your current IT spending
The first step in addressing your IT budget is to understand how you are currently spending your available funds. All costs of maintaining the IT environment must be considered to perform an accurate assessment. The collected information needs to provide the level of detail necessary to evaluate how the existing infrastructure is constructed and supported so it can be compared against alternative solutions.
The assessment should include monitoring usage throughout the environment to identify resources that may be underutilized or obsolete. Cost can be substantially reduced by eliminating unused systems from the infrastructure. Consideration should be given to consolidating servers or employing virtualization to minimize the costs associated with maintaining physical hardware.
On-premises data centers will enjoy additional savings by minimizing the cost of providing power and cooling the sunset systems. This can be accomplished by opting for more energy-efficient hardware and cooling systems. Trimming monthly utility costs offers a painless way to reduce the IT budget.
Organizations with a cloud presence need to ensure they are using all contracted resources efficiently. Capacity needs may have changed since migrating to the cloud and assessing cloud spending can find multiple ways to minimize costs. These include opting for a different pricing structure or changing the cloud delivery model to reflect current business requirements.
Assessments should be conducted regularly no matter what type of IT environment is under review. Changing market conditions may necessitate the investigation of new products and services to save money and improve operational efficiency.
Take advantage of cloud computing options
Companies with on-premises IT environments should strongly consider migrating part or all of their infrastructure to the cloud. Public cloud service providers (CSPs) such as AWS, Google, and Microsoft provide customers with a wide variety of IT offerings that can replace existing solutions. Migrating to the cloud can save money in several ways.
- Using cloud resources eliminates the costs of purchasing and maintaining hardware and an on-premises computing environment.
- Cloud costs can be controlled by utilizing pay-as-you-go pricing models that only charge customers for resources they use.
- Software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions allow companies to take advantage of new technologies with a minimal initial investment to boost their competitive standing.
It is essential to deploy the proper tools to monitor and manage cloud resources and expenses. While the cloud certainly provides opportunities to save money, a mismanaged cloud environment can result in excessive costs and suboptimal performance. You need to obtain a comprehensive view of your complete cloud infrastructure, especially when implementing a hybrid or multi-cloud approach.
Evaluate vendors and software licensing options
Companies should explore the possibility of renegotiating vendor contracts to obtain better pricing or advantageous terms. Your current spending may help influence vendors to give you a better deal rather than risk losing your business. Organizations should also evaluate alternative solutions that address business requirements and may offer another avenues for reducing costs.
For example, the major CSPs often offer similar products or services. Comparison shopping based on your unique business situation can identify savings in storage or computing power by switching to a different vendor. Similar savings may be available to organizations with on-premises environments. Deploying an alternative backup solution or virtualizing servers can lead to substantial cost savings.
Software licenses should also be reviewed to ensure you don’t have more licenses than needed. Eliminating excessive licenses can be a big cost saver. Open source solutions may also be appropriate to address specific requirements and reduce costs compared to commercial software products.
Don’t skimp on cybersecurity and data protection spending
At first glance, it may seem counter-intuitive to encourage companies to spend money when looking at cost-saving strategies. Cybersecurity and data protection are areas where costs cannot be the deciding factor when selecting the appropriate solutions. The majority of modern companies would be hard-pressed to survive without access to their computing environment. Many businesses would be forced to close in the wake of an extended outage.
Addressing this risk demands the implementation of strong cybersecurity and data protection solutions to defend the environment from threat actors. Companies should undertake a thorough review of security measures to identify vulnerabilities that need to be mitigated. They also need to ensure data protection with effective backup and disaster recovery strategies.
VAST Can Help Optimize Your IT Budget
We can help your organization optimize its IT budget with a wide selection of products and services. Following are some of the ways our team will help you get the most out of your IT spending while ensuring the performance and availability of your systems and data resources.
- Our strategic partnerships with industry-leading vendors put us in an excellent position to find the right solution for your unique needs.
- We offer managed services that address both cloud and on-premises environments.
- Cloud backup-as-a-service (CBaaS) makes it easy for any company to securely back up valuable data assets.
- Disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) leverages the capabilities of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery for enhanced business resilience.
- Our proprietary VAST View platform offers comprehensive cloud management capabilities to help migrate and optimize cloud environments.
Get in touch today and let us help you optimize your IT spending.
