Yes, you can cut IT costs and still maintain productivity. Here’s how:

October 14th, 2022
Yes, you can cut IT costs and still maintain productivity. Here’s how:

For many businesses, IT serves as the virtual muscle that does the heavy lifting when executing programmatic and automated processes, monitoring operations, and assessing everything from product quality to customer satisfaction to overall organizational performance. And, if we factor in business intelligence, IT also serves as a virtual brain.

Given how crucial IT is, can you cut IT costs and still keep current productivity levels? Our answer to that question is yes. Here’s how you can do so:

Perform regular IT audits to optimize IT spending

To safeguard against excessive IT costs, conduct regular IT audits. For instance, an area where a lot of organizations recoup savings is their cloud spending. Often, they’re paying for overprovisioned resources or abandoned instances that needlessly use software licenses that could be reserved or productively used elsewhere. By optimizing your use of the cloud and other IT resources, you can sustain productivity while increasing profitability.

Leverage automation

In almost any type of organization, one of the largest costs is human resources. You would be wise to keep staff to high-value tasks, but there would be instances wherein they must do repetitive, low-skill, time-consuming yet low-value tasks.

While automating tasks does not strictly lower IT costs, you do get to reduce or even eliminate processes that are time-consuming and error-prone, increasing productivity and, therefore, profitability. With the right solutions, you may also increase efficiency and accuracy while reducing equipment wear and tear.

A managed IT services provider (MSP) can help you leverage automation by identifying opportunities to automate and implement solutions that fit your unique needs. Your business can look into leveraging automation for invoicing, social media marketing, customer support and engagement, data backup, and other similar, set-and-forget business tasks. An MSP can then make sure your automation solutions stay up to date as your business needs change as well as provide ongoing support.

Ultimately, implementing automation tools can reduce labor costs. Not only does it slash the number of hours employees spend on repetitive tasks, but it also lessens your need to call on IT support to fix recurring technical issues. From a practical perspective, you can count staving off additional costs while also cutting costs.

Let go of outdated tech

Many business owners and managers make the mistake of overextending the use of their outdated IT systems and devices. In their minds, they’re being cost-effective by squeezing as much value out of what they currently have. However, what they fail to realize is that their resistance to change is likely costing their business more money than it is saving.

First of all, legacy software programs become more expensive to hold on to as time goes by, mostly because software publishers charge ever-increasing fees to sustain support for such programs. And when publishers cease support for these programs, they stop creating bug fixes and security patches. Cybercriminals can discover vulnerabilities and use these to infiltrate your company’s network and cause your business to suffer costly downtime.

Second, old equipment tends to be slow, which makes users and teams less productive. Such machinery also tends to be:

  • Incompatible with newer, more efficient programs
  • No longer supported by the manufacturer
  • Vulnerable to cyberthreats

All in all, while acquiring or renting new IT assets will increase IT costs, you’ll also cut needless costs associated with using old IT. And when you invest in the tech that best fits your business, you’ll increase productivity instead of merely maintaining it.

To optimize IT spending, leverage automation, and properly upgrade your IT infrastructure, partner up with Healthy IT. Schedule a free, no-obligation consultation with us to learn more.