Scale Your IT to Better Manage Your Budget

 Today’s business has to do more with less. This goes for all of its resources including the technology it uses. Runaway IT budgets can put a lot of pressure on the technology to do more than it can. To get the most out of your business’ technology investments, consider the following strategies.

Assessing the Role of Your IT

To properly assess your business’ position when it comes to technology, you will need to lay out all your expenses and accounts. The first thing you’ll want to do after that is look for any redundancies and unnecessary overlaps. You may be surprised that you are paying for technology you don’t need, or worse yet, that you don’t use. 

Once that is complete you should ascertain if your business currently uses all of the remaining accounts that it’s paying for. For most Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) titles, you can pause subscriptions for a defined amount of time before your data is lost. Refer to your service agreements for more information, but suspending underutilized cloud subscriptions can put more available coins in your business’ proverbial pocket. 

Make a Switch 

If your business uses traditional methods of securing software, you may not save money on the product directly, but you will likely save money on the cloud service since the hosting company also pays for data redundancy and maintenance. Either way, switching to a SaaS platform can allow you to redirect the way you pay for your software, providing some extra affordability. 

Today, there are a lot of cloud-hosted options available, and you may be able to save a bit of cheddar by using comparable, but less-expensive options. You can also take advantage of cloud-hosted systems to reimagine your business’ communications, collaboration, and marketing efforts. 

If your business pays for mobile devices and subscriptions, you can cut a substantial cost by switching to a Bring Your Own Device model. Today’s productivity and security platforms provide options to manage business data and applications without having to own the device they are on, meaning that businesses can disseminate apps and data securely to employee-owned devices and save on device, service, and data plans.

Prioritize Using Services with Fixed Costs, When Possible

With cloud computing being so prevalent, many businesses will simply choose to use the cloud for all of their business’ computing needs. This can get expensive quickly. Many of the top cloud-hosted infrastructure providers charge by the user, or by the gigabyte. If you are utilizing the platform the way you would a company-hosted platform, you will likely drown your company in cloud costs. 

You will want to prioritize your per-user cloud accounts that charge a flat rate for an application, maintenance, hosting, and security. They won’t bring variable bills to your IT budget and that can be enough to keep from spending too much capital than you want (or can) on technology.