How to Cut Your IT Budget – Part 1: Don’t Overpay for Licenses!

It’s always a smart idea to figure out how you can reduce your IT spend and save big on your IT budget – but right now, it’s especially important.

Luckily, most companies have quite a few lurking and totally unnecessary costs feeding into their IT budgets, so it’s often easy and painless to reduce IT spending waste.

In this 3-part series, we’ll cover quite a few ways you can reduce IT spend at your company. Of course, you can always get more tips by reaching out to the top IT managed service providers at one of the leading Seattle managed IT services companies: Interplay.

Ready to get a hand with cutting your IT budget? Let’s go for it.

Licensing

Licensing costs are probably the lowest-hanging fruit right now for a lot of companies, especially ones that use a large number of cloud services. If you keep wondering why your monthly or annual IT budget expenses are sky high, you’ll want to make sure you haven’t purchased more licenses than you actually need for your current staffing levels.

It’s well worth it to take the time and do the math on this one, especially if you’ve recently reduced your headcount. As you can imagine, your cloud service providers are unlikely to proactively notify you when your licenses aren’t being used.

Expert tip: When you get in touch with your account manager to talk about licenses for your cloud service, see if they’d be open to renegotiating your costs. Maybe they would! Worst case scenario: you get a “no,” and you still save money by reducing your license count. Win, right? 🙂

Expert tip #2: There was a pun in the first paragraph in this section. Did you catch it?

Hardware Replacement

It goes without saying that keeping your equipment up to date seems like an expense in a lot of cases, but new hardware will actually save you money over the life of the product in terms of increased productivity and reduced downtime.

Wondering what hardware you should consider replacing on a regular basis? Here’s a tip: Consider EVERYTHING.

Many business leaders are surprised to learn that there’s a recommended lifecycle for every piece of hardware, including laptops, desktops, switches, routers, printers, cameras, access points, backup systems, mobile devices, and everything else too.

In other words: If it feels like some of your hardware is getting old and slow, it may be past time to replace it. However, if you’d like some help determining what truly needs to be replaced, versus what can wait, ask a respected IT support company in your area. We happen to know of a great IT support company in Seattle… (Big hint: It’s Interplay!)

Domain Names, Web Properties, Etc.

Some companies are sitting on many registered domain names, SSL certificates (which can really add up), web hosting services, and other web-related stuff that they no longer need. Sound familiar?

The charges for each individual service here might not look like much ($18 for a domain name here, $10 for a shared hosting service there), and therefore all the charges get dutifully paid by accounting – sometimes for years on end without anyone noticing.

Most of the time, no one asks IT about these costs and the accountants say, “We don’t know if we need to pay it, but we’re worried what might happen if we don’t.”

Expert tip: Take a few minutes, maybe half an hour, to ask IT which of these costs should and shouldn’t be included in your IT budget going forward. You’ll walk away with a good list of costs you can cut immediately. Pretty cool, right?

Need Help Sorting Through All the Details for Your IT Budget? Get a Helping Hand from Interplay.

For 20 years now, the friendly, approachable, and downright awesome IT experts at Interplay have been helping organizations like yours reduce IT spending waste while maximizing IT impact. We know, this all kind of sounds like a sales pitch… but we really can’t figure out any other way to explain how little you’ll spend on your IT compared to how much bang for your buck you’ll get from your IT when you work with us.

Oh, hey, it looks like we did figure out another way to say that, huh?

If you’re ready to cut your IT budget while resting assured that your tech is secure, up-to-date, and continuously supported, you’ll want to reach out to the Seattle IT services experts: Interplay.

Find out what we do!

 


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