Cutting costs is the primary goal for most business owners. They’ll scour their books looking for areas that offer a little wiggle room and decide what’s important and what’s a luxury. The reality is, due to lack of time or expertise, nearly every business has hidden savings within their IT. Here are four major steps you can take to make better technology decisions that improve your bottom line.
#1 – Keep a Watchful Eye on Your Network
Proactively monitoring a network’s device data lets you identify abnormal activity in real time, giving you the ability to act before small hiccups snowball into large problems. Plus, it reduces downtime and investigation time, saving you time and money when problems do occur.
#2 – Look at Downtime Differently
You can spend thousands to protect your company, but no form of technology is completely fool-proof. All businesses experience some form of downtime. The reason companies pay so much for networks isn’t to ensure they’re up 99.9 percent of the time but to make sure the .1 percent they’re not available doesn’t bring your operation to a screeching halt. What does your businesses continuity plan look like? How long can you be down? How will you access your data if your servers crash? Will your business survive? Preventing downtime is important but having an action plan that kicks in when downtime takes place is imperative.
#3 – Prepare for Growth
The biggest costs that often get overlooked are in predicting the pace of business and change. Growth is the reason you’re in business, but it’s tough to anticipate costs when it happens fast. You need scalable, flexible technology solutions. Look to the cloud to meet your currents needs with the ability to scale up or down while also removing the costs of increasing physical hardware and software licensing.
#4 – Ask Questions First
Advice from a professional is the best way to ensure you don’t overspend on IT. Too many businesses jump into making hasty, uniformed decisions about technology investments and network infrastructures and end up paying too much. By talking with a managed service provider like us, you get all the facts and understand the cost associated with each potential decision.
Technology is essential for your success, but you have a lot of balls in the air, so it often takes a backseat or doesn’t get the right focus—leading to costly decisions. Now’s the perfect time to get some expert advice. Through September 30, get a free, no-obligation IT cost reduction assessment. We’ll take a look at your current situation, make recommendations on where you can save and offer affordable options for the future. If we can’t save you money, we’ll give you $100. We’re here to help.