(Newswire.net — February 27, 2020) — The CEO of Apptio, Sunny Gupta, says “Every CIO has 70-80 percent of their cost structure and IT budget tied into ‘run IT’, or business as usual, with only 20-30 percent focused on innovation.”
Just keeping a company running properly can drain so many resources, it’s difficult to find funds to allocate for innovation and testing potentially profitable new programs.
With these IT strategies, you can lower costs as well as increase performance, freeing up time, money, and thought power for building up your company.
Krystal Triumph, a Philadelphia IT support professional shares some great thoughts on how information technology can help increase company profits.
Sales Data Analysis
Every action your sales team takes can be used to create a big picture understanding of the dynamics that your company runs on. Some dynamics provide all the value, and others are wastes of time or even eat into profits. You’ll never know which projects work and which don’t without careful data collection, organization, and analysis.
Organize your data and input it into a processing system like Excel. By isolating your sales rates, performance by product, performance by area, and more, you’ll be able to discover untapped opportunities. Having a clear vision is essential for steering the company towards greater success.
Managed IT Services
According to Market Watch, “The global managed services market was valued at USD 155.91 billion in 2017, and is expected to reach USD 296.38 by 2023.” That’s almost a doubling in value in just 6 years!
Most sales teams use IT services for at least one service. Buffing up your in-house IT services means hiring full-time employees that draw a paycheck whether there are any IT problems to solve or not.
In contrast, you can call on managed IT services only when you need them, allowing you to spend less on maintenance and more on creativity.
Take Advantage of the Cloud
Cloud solutions are one of the cutting edge solutions that allow you to minimize waste. Cloud solutions let you borrow the hardware power of providers. Just as with managed IT services, you can use that power only when you need it, allowing you to spend less on hardware yourself.
Open-Source Software
Open-source software is a mixed bag of curiosities and top quality products. Before you spend your budget on an expensive new software product, perform a handful of google searches and find out if there’s an open-source alternative.
Open-source software is completely free to use. Additionally, the code for open-source software is 100% transparent, so popular products have been scrutinized by experts the world over to ensure their safety and quality.
Save On Expensive Hardware
New technology can allow you to “cheat” with your hardware needs. For certain jobs, you might have needed to buy an extremely powerful (and extremely expensive) server to manage them. With new connection tools, however, you can buy several smaller units and link them together to get the same capabilities.
Depending on your situation, several smaller computers can be far cheaper than one uber-server.
Data Center Colocation
What hardware you do need to keep on hand can be a bit finicky. Hardware requires a temperature-controlled environment to function at its best and to last as long as possible. Additionally, in the business world, your hardware can be the target of cybercriminals and others.
Companies with valuable hardware often end up shelling out big money to create a data center to store their hardware. They create temperature-controlled and secure environments to protect against environmental and human threats.
Rather than build that environment yourself, you can rent space from a colocation center, allowing you to enjoy the benefits of quality storage without all the costs.
Carefully Hire Offshore Talent
Opening up your search for IT services to the whole world can allow you to access markets where prices are far cheaper. For any service you need to be performed, you can almost certainly find quality at a much lower price, sometimes several times lower!
Be careful to vet offshore talent before you hire it, though. As long as you stick to contractors or companies that have been reviewed positively by many companies in the past, you should be able to find top-tier performance at amazing prices.
IT strategy is defining business success more and more. To stay on top, using the latest solutions is key!