Tip of the Week: 3 Ways to Prevent Technology From Busting Your Budget

When it comes to making progress on your organization’s future, your IT budget presents your business with a major roadblock. We bet that it would feel great to eliminate the stress associated with your IT budget. Here are three ways that you can plan for your business’s future and keep that IT budget slimmed down.

Build an IT Roadmap
If you want to make the best decisions for the future of your hardware and software procurement, you can’t make these choices on a day-by-day basis. An unexpected server or workstation failure will be a major detriment for your organization. You’ll probably have to invest in new systems which will break your budget.

An IT roadmap can easily resolve this issue. By working with a trusted network administrator or IT technician, you can plan out how you want to allocate your resources across the next one, five, or ten years. This is a great way to make sure that your hardware and software refreshes aren’t unexpected or budget-breaking. Furthermore, with an IT roadmap you can guarantee that your budget is flexible enough to work around major changes.

Minimize Downtime
Downtime is a major disruption that most organizations consider to be the biggest waste of time and resources. Downtime is any situation where your business cannot operate at full capacity, either due to a loss of personnel, Internet connection, or mission-critical resources. As such, technology failure is a major cause of downtime, and eliminating these issues is key to maximizing the value you get from your IT budget.

This problem is simple to eliminate, as a backup and disaster recovery is capable of practically eliminating downtime caused by hardware failure and technological troubles. BDR provides comprehensive, consistent access to several modes of data backup, including both on-site and off-site options. Furthermore, in the face of disasters like floods and fires, there’s no better way to get back in the game. BDR can restore your data directly to the BDR device from the cloud, drastically cutting down on time spent resolving issues.

Outsource as Much as Possible
While it may seem like a good idea to handle as much IT maintenance as possible by yourself, this is a dangerous practice that can lead to lost time and assets down the road. Let’s use an analogy to explain why it’s best to have professional technicians working with your technology: would you rather have a trained pilot fly a commercial airliner, or fly the plane yourself for free after reviewing a quick online tutorial on how to operate the mechanism? That’s right--you’d probably select the actual pilot with the years of training.

Outsourcing is a way for businesses of all shapes and sizes to obtain skills that they may not be able to take advantage of otherwise. In particular, IT maintenance and management translates well to an outsourced service. Hiring new in-house technicians means adding new salaries to your budget, whereas outsourcing provides an affordable alternative in the form of monthly payments for services rendered. You can take your IT’s capital costs and turn them into operation costs.

Horne & Benik wants to help your organization work around your IT budget to achieve its greatest potential. To learn more, reach out to us at (603) 499-4400.