HOW TO DO MORE WITH LESS: IT BUDGETS ARE PLUMMETING BUT EXPECTATIONS ARE HIGHER THAN EVER

“This year, IT is going to have the largest allocation of our budget going forward,” said no senior management, ever.

We live in an age of exponential technological growth and with it, comes increased demand and expectation on IT services. Unfortunately for us, most companies do not increase their IT budgets proportionally, with many actually restricting them.

So how do you serve your staff if you’re on a tight budget? Is your job security on the line if you don’t deliver? Are you developing stress-related insomnia?

Well, we’ve compiled this guide to help you perform on a tight budget.

• Form an open relationship – what you do in your private life is entirely up to you. But in the workplace, open-source is sometimes better. From file archivers to office software, you may be surprised by the sheer volume of open source solutions available. If your business has only a small requirement or low usage of certain applications, maybe it’s better to move over to free solutions rather than forking out for the big brands.
• Overlapping bundled software – many software services come with bundled features that may overlap. For example, Microsoft Office for Business comes with email hosting and cloud drives as standard. Google’s G Suite comes with the Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides. So do you need to pay for both?
• Cloud or ground – if your servers are getting a little outdated – which is every two years according to Moore’s law, it may be more cost-effective migrating to the cloud rather than upgrading your hardware. It’s about finding what’s best for your company’s storage needs in terms of cost, compliance and availability.
• Outsource – although it can initially seem more expensive, outsourcing to IT service providers can take away the need to recruit, train and pay new members of staff, making it very cost-effective in the long run. If you’re in need of a fast IT infrastructure upgrade, with little to no downtime, it may be more efficient to bring in help to avoid any disruption to your company’s productivity.
• Ask for more – if you can’t squeeze everything into your budget, there’s no shame in asking for more budget. It can be hard to get the message through to management. But stress the importance of your upgrade, boast about increases to productivity and long-term benefits towards your company’s budgets. Money talks, and if you can save your company money in the long-run, it’s unlikely to fall on deaf ears.

We all know that IT isn’t always the key priority in a company’s budgets and this is completely unfair. IT contributes so much to operations and yet mostly goes unnoticed. That’s why we’ve built our reputation around delivering successful projects, on-time, on-budget, across a range of industries around the UK.