Marching orders for IT teams everywhere since the dawn of the information age: Do more with less. This dynamic continues today.
According to Gartner, worldwide IT spending is rising 7.5 percent in 2024 to $5.26 trillion despite economic headwinds. That’s good news for IT departments. However, increasing demands for digital transformation are outpacing budgets for many organizations.
So, even when resources are available, IT leaders must optimize budgets to find room for service improvements. If you’re going through—or need to start—this process, here are four tips to keep you on the right path.
1. Give
Your Hardware a Facelift
Modern phone services can be an excellent start for optimizing your IT budget—especially if you use a traditional phone system. Moving to a VoIP system with SIP Trunking or a cloud-based business phone service simultaneously reduces costs and enhances service delivery.
When you’re running cost-benefit analyses, keep these four factors in mind:
- Maintenance Costs— Antiquated, unoptimized hardware requires substantial investment in ongoing maintenance and troubleshooting.
- Right-sized Solutions—Consider whether you need a complete communications suite at every location and extension, or if you can customize your features to meet your specific business needs.
- Scalability—Choose a solution that can scale with you as your business grows. If your business is seasonal, find one that can flex when needed.
- CapEx vs. OpEx—The ability to shift expenses from a CapEx to an OpEx model offers significant financial relief that may tip the scales toward managed solutions and subscription-based services.
2. Embrace the Cloud
Cloud solutions delivered by a managed services provider (MSP) can be a genuine rainmaker for your IT budget, impacting direct and indirect costs now and in the future. Embracing cloud services can help your organization realize the following benefits:
- Reduced In-house IT Costs— Cloud services save money by eliminating unnecessary upfront expenditure in hardware and advanced software.
- Unburdened IT Teams— Outsourcing maintenance and upgrades to an MSP frees your IT team to focus on critical day-to-day operations and other high-value tasks.
- Affordable Remote Work— Cloud infrastructure and services can easily enable work from home (WFH) and work from anywhere (WFA) business models.
- Decreased Downtime— Cloud services for redundancy and resiliency, like Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS), minimize the impact of disaster scenarios, like service outage, cyberattack and natural disaster. Plus, cloud-based solutions are essential for restoring regular business operations as soon as possible.
- Increased Scalability— Cloud services let you source infrastructure and services as needed, allowing you to accommodate future demand.
- Expert Support— The best cloud services are typically backed by highly skilled engineers and solutions experts who deliver high-value technical expertise.
3. Review Security Measures
According to IBM, an average data breach costs $4.88 million in 2024, an increase of 10 percent from 2023. Even small-scale events can be costly, losing potential revenue, disrupting operations and damaging customer reputation. You need to ensure your cybersecurity solutions are up to snuff.
Steps you can take today that can save you headaches (and money!) tomorrow include:
- Updating hardware and software— Outdated equipment and unpatched software applications are more susceptible to cyberattack. Adopting cloud services will resolve these threats automatically, but, if you rely on legacy services, you must prioritize securing those above all else.
- Reviewing security services— Ensure that your cybersecurity services are meeting your business goals and compliance needs and are consistently updated to combat evolving cyberthreats.
- Making security awareness training mandatory— Most successful security breaches involve human error and exploitation. Educating employees on prominent cyberthreats and proper practices for promoting cyberhealth is essential to achieving a successful, comprehensive security posture.
- Updating your disaster recovery plans— Disaster recovery plans are vital to weathering cyberattacks or natural disasters while minimizing business impact. Make a formal schedule to keep yours up to date. Cloud solutions like DRaaS and BaaS can add additional resiliency.
4. Enlist a Partner
The most turnkey and comprehensive approach to optimizing IT spending is enlisting an MSP as your advisor and advocate. Outsourcing IT services planning and management can save you time, money and headaches. Ideally, your partner can identify, source, implement and maintain the right technologies for your budgets and business goals. Plus, well-established partners can stretch your budgets by letting you ride their economies of scale to achieve cost benefits you could not reach directly.
How can partnering with Cox Business help?
The answer is “All of the above.” We can help you with planning, migrating to the cloud, shoring up your business continuity and disaster recovery strategy, bolstering your security, modernizing your phone system and more.
