How to reduce your IT expenditure

IT is usually one of the main expense areas for many types of modern businesses, and it’s easy to sink a lot of resources into this area if you’re not careful and don’t have a properly organized infrastructure. You have to be careful when your business is expanding, and always plan one or two steps ahead when investing in any new IT technologies or personnel, otherwise your expenses can quickly balloon to an unmanageable level.

Make wise use of outsourcing

Outsourcing is a popular topic nowadays, albeit a controversial one. Many companies are realizing the benefits of offloading parts of their work externally, and it’s true that this can often open great opportunities for saving. However, you have to be careful, as it’s easy to let things spin out of control when relying too much on outsourcing. Only do it for aspects of your business that are not mission-critical, as you don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you can’t even pull the right string to restore things back to normal after an incident. And unfortunately, this tends to happen more often than you might think with modern businesses.

Standardize your infrastructure

Lacking a standardized approach to your IT infrastructure is another common mistake that can lead to huge expenses in a relatively short time. Make sure that as many of your tools as possible are provided by the same vendor and that you also have a centralized point of contact for their support and maintenance. ITSM software can be quite complex these days, with large suites of applications that can cover all your needs from A to Z, and the more of it that you have under one roof, the easier it will be to manage the IT side of things in your organization.

Preventative measures are cheaper than fixing a crisis

Security audits, important software and hardware upgrades, hiring the right advanced specialists – these are all things that many companies tend to postpone until the last possible moment, at which point they inevitably have to spend significantly more to cover their bases properly. A little preventative thinking can go a long way in ensuring that your business can continue to run smoothly over time without putting you in any urgent crisis situations. Spending the money on a penetration test now means not having to potentially pay several times more for an emergency security fix once someone exploits a hole in your systems and attacks you.

The bottom line in most cases is that you need to think about the main problems in your line of work before they’ve even become a reality, because in IT, fixing things urgently can cost significantly more than building up a defense against those problems. You must also be familiar with the tools available on your respective market and how they can be combined and organized into sensible groups for better control over the situation, and you should take advantage of every opportunity for standardization that you run into, as this will make things much easier for you in the future.