How to Reduce Technology Costs with IT Cost Reduction

Keeping technology costs as low as possible without compromising performance or scale is among the most important goals of your IT team.

An effective IT strategy balances IT cost reduction while keeping the right capacity and functionality in place and preventing you from making these mistakes.

Despite the importance of IT to day-to-day business operations, many technology leaders are given relatively small budgets while often being expected to perform miracles.

10 IT Cost Reduction Initiatives That You Can Implement Immediately

Fortunately, there are various strategies IT leaders can employ to achieve significant IT cost reductions while making long-term improvements to performance and bottom line. Let’s review some of those strategies to build an effective IT cost reduction framework:

1. Replace Hardware With Virtualization

Purchasing, managing, and replacing hardware and software can easily drive up expenses while placing a significant strain on your budget. Virtualization eliminates these issues and is an effective way to generate cost savings.

Virtualization allows businesses to maximize their use of server resources by increasing capacity by four times more than physical environments. Companies often move to virtual environments to reduce energy and hardware costs while increasing the flexibility of their IT environment. This is particularly helpful for remote work.

2. Migrate to a Software-Defined Data Center

The next logical step after virtualizing your IT environment is migrating to a software-defined data center. This type of data center pools resources to eliminate the need for businesses to scale up capacity and costs during demand spikes.

It also reduces the costs required for data center system maintenance, and possibly even software licenses.

The other benefit of a software-defined data center is that it gives you access to a team of IT experts who are on call to maximize performance while minimizing costs.

3. Make Outsourcing IT Support Part of Your Cost Reduction Strategies

Outsourcing IT management is an effective way to reduce costs and gain a competitive advantage. Managed service providers (MSPs) employ teams of experts that only bill your business for the services and time you need, which keeps IT costs under control.

MSPs can also be invaluable partners in helping your business access to the most cost-effective technologies by leveraging their vendor relationships.

4. Optimize Cost Further by Outsourcing Your Cybersecurity

Handing over your cybersecurity needs to trustworthy professionals is not only a good way to keep your business secure, but it can also bring down costs.

Through their specialization in the field, cybersecurity providers can deliver robust security at a fraction of the costs it would take to safeguard the business with an in-house team.

5. Introduce a Hybrid Cloud-Based Setup

Hybrid cloud strategies can reduce costs, improve productivity and bolster security, making them a solid choice for any business looking to improve their efficiency.

The hybrid cloud model is popular because it allows businesses to control what systems, tools, and data are publicly and privately accessible in the most cost-effective manner. They’re also highly scalable and make upgrading or adding functionality cost-efficient and simple.

6. Optimize Your Cloud Environment and Reduce Cloud Costs

It can be easy for cloud environments to grow out of control because services are so easy to introduce.

However, if you haven’t reviewed your cloud environment for a while, there’s a chance that you’re either not using or under-using tools and services.

Conducting a complete analysis of your cloud operations will give you insight into the components that can be removed or limited to bring further cost savings to your business.

7. Consolidate Systems Wherever Possible

One of the most effective ways to reduce IT costs while streamlining the environment is to find ways to combine disparate processes and systems into unified solutions.

Be sure you can keep the business running while working on these consolidations, as there’s a chance that things could break or employees will be resistant to moving away from legacy tools.

8. Standardize Your IT Environment to Reduce Technology Costs

Standardization is a common IT strategy that brings a cohesive approach to infrastructure management. By introducing policies and procedures that promote standardizing systems, many inefficiencies can be eliminated by removing expensive and unnecessary customization.

It could be as simple as making sure that all employees are running on the same operating system or as complex as reshaping the entire IT infrastructure to use as few tools and vendors as possible.

9. Understand the Different Types of IT Costs

You should have a clear idea of how your operational expenses (OPEX) and your capital expenses (CAPEX) because this can inform where there are areas for potential cost savings.

If capital expenditures seem high, focus on optimizing costs for maintenance, upgrades, and procurement of new technologies.

If operational business expenses are the issue, think about where you can reduce inventory costs, equipment fees, and the like.

10. Improve Team Morale and Reduce Staff Turnover

Keeping your IT staff happy and engaged is a guaranteed way to keep labor costs under control. You don’t want to be paying salaries to people who aren’t providing value or deal with recruitment costs on a regular basis.

If you are assured that your IT team will remain with the company, you won’t need to worry as much about factoring hiring and onboarding costs into your budget.

Pull the Right IT Cost Reduction Levers With a Trusted Partner

The sooner you get to work on reducing IT costs, the more money you’ll save for your business. The savings you generate will help you make more forward-thinking technology investments.

Working with a cost-conscious managed service provider is usually the best way to determine where your business can reduce IT spend.

ITSco can help you find ways to cut costs while laying a stronger and leaner foundation for success. Contact us today to learn more.