5 Tips to Stretch Your IT Budget
One of the great challenges facing every IT department and provider in the business is the limited budget. IT experts can spend all of your money in a flash. There is always something newer, faster, and better to pursue. But, IT investments don’t come with guaranteed returns.
You have to make a budget that you can reasonably afford, and then you have to stretch that budget as far as possible to optimize your spending. It’s not always easy, but fortunately, there are a few tricks that can help in this department.
Below, you’ll find five specific tips that help you get more while spending less. Implement these ideas, and you’ll have an easier time staying within your budget while still finding ways to improve your IT resources and assets along the way.
Identify Your Foundation
Networks have foundational components and critical infrastructure. They also have optimizations and expansions. When you identify the most critical needs to maintain and grow your network, you can focus on expenses related to them.
Essentially, you’re separating needs from wants. This helps you spend money more efficiently, which leads to better budget management.
Plan Around the Lifecycle
Every device within a network has a lifecycle. If you understand those lifecycles and how they fit together, then you can plan around them.
As lifecycles end, inevitable expenses arise while you replace and upgrade equipment and software. You know that it’s going to happen, so you can plan the budget around these cycles of increased costs.
Additionally, you can think about lifecycles with every investment. This enables you to optimize spending around longevity, stretching the long-term budget, even if it sometimes comes with short-term increased costs.
Maintenance, Maintenance, Maintenance
Run your updates. Take good care of your equipment. Do the routine things that help everything to last longer. Every time you extend the life of your equipment or software, you save money.
Perhaps more importantly, maintenance is what allows you to find and repair issues before they can escalate. Every time you avert a significant problem with maintenance, you save money several times over.
You save on the cost of emergency responses, which can include overtime and sudden costs. You also avoid downtime, which is one of the most expensive problems that an IT department can face.
Leverage Repairs
It ties in with maintenance, but there are many cases when failing equipment can be repaired rather than replaced. This is especially true considering the modular nature of many modern devices.
It’s not that the whole server went out; only a component within the server failed. If you can identify and replace that single component, you save money on expenses by avoiding more expensive replacements and extending the life of all of your equipment.
Save With Pre-Owned Hardware
One of the easiest ways to save money in IT is to buy less-expensive hardware. This is where the previously-owned market comes into play.
Refurbished devices are available for virtually any hardware that you need in a business network. You can get refurbished devices that are certified and come with reliable warranties. We offer CK Certified refurbished hardware that comes with a Lifetime Warranty. That makes the hardware just as reliable as brand-new devices, but they come at a fraction of the price.
Other previously-owned devices are not necessarily refurbished but can still come with certifications, warranties, and guarantees. Again, you can get reliable hardware at a fraction of the price of brand-new equipment.
When you make this part of your IT strategy, your savings will compound, and you’ll find that you have room in the budget for other smart investments that help the business and even make your IT resources more efficient.
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