Every company is worried about their bottom line. After all, you need to earn a profit at the end of the year, right? One aspect of a business’ expenses which is usually overlooked is the cost of technology. By reviewing and reducing the cost of technology, partly by taking your business operational to the cloud, a business will be able to increase profits in the long run. How is this done?
Here are a few ways you can do it with the help of Frontier Internet:
Find the costs
There are a number of layers that make up the technological infrastructure of a company. If you want to reduce costs, you will first have to get to know each layer. Cutting costs will be impossible if you don’t even know what they are, right? Every business needs to have a budget. Regularly auditing the budget and making the necessary changes is essential for reducing costs.
Search for any redundancies in your systems. Is the same job being done more than once? How many operating systems overlap with each other? Even though most employees today prefer bringing in their own devices to work, they all need to be at the same level when it comes to business applications.
Just because software as a service (SaaS) is proving to be a valuable resource in today’s world doesn’t mean you need to fill up your plate with all the software and applications on offer. Most businesses today use anything between 18 and 25 applications for processing orders, gathering information, and running their business. The average tech cost per employee has been estimated at $700 per year. How much can you lower this cost?
Internet services are usually overlooked by businesses because of their marginal cost. But over a year, the savings from switching to a cost effective service, like Frontier Internet, can be quite high. Don’t overlook it. All business managers and even public sector managers should be looking at ways to reduces costs.
Migrating to the cloud
Moving company data to the cloud is a judicious way of reducing costs while also consolidating information. Just consider the cloud as a 3rd party hosting site of sorts which allows you complete control and frees up the IT systems on your business.
The easiest way to explain how this works is through a metaphor. Imagine renting storage space so that you can free up space at home. You aren’t really getting rid of anything that goes into storage but it isn’t in the way any longer either. This will allow you to use the storage space in your home more effectively.
Similarly, moving data to the cloud can also help increase productivity levels on internal systems and ensure you get the most from a work day. This will help bolster the bottom line for sure.
Proactive maintenance
It doesn’t matter how powerful your IT systems are, they can be fragile at times. It is difficult to imagine any person who uses a computer regularly not dealing with a crashed or frozen hard drive at least once. With personal computers, the solution here is to fix the computer and keep using it until it is beyond repair or until buying a new one just makes financial sense (with the computers falling in prices, spending more than $150 or so to fix a computer does not make that much sense if you buy a new one for $350, for instance).
But this isn’t a practical approach as far as businesses are concerned. This is where a tech support company can really come in handy. They can maintain your computers and ensure you never have to deal with crashes or frozen hard drives. There’s no point in spending exorbitantly on new computers every couple of years when there is such a simple and cost effective solution to avoid any problems altogether and as just stated, new computers are not that expensive anymore.
Tech companies will monitor all the systems and alert you regarding any problems when it comes to malware or capacity issues. It’s just like taking your car in for scheduled maintenance instead of waiting for it to break down while you’re driving.
Consolidation
When you consolidate IT infrastructure and resources, especially in your company’s data center, you will ensure your resources are used efficiently, security and document management improves, and complexity is reduced. Some of the elements worth consolidating are:
- Servers: Focusing on virtual machines is a stellar way to reduce physical server numbers and getting rid of redundancies.
- File storage: Storage area networks can help centralize data in a single location. They offer better performance as compared to local storage and are quite economical when it comes to large storage requirements.
- Directory services: Providing a common directory service is cheaper than distributed systems which only increases costs.
