6 Ways to Reduce Software and Hardware Budgets

Who wants to realize a project with the minimum budget but shoot up the maximum efficiency? The answer is quite simple: everyone. Whether your organization is a nonprofit or a profit-oriented organization, the answers will be the same. Getting more efficient results while paying less is of utmost importance for any organization.

Different departments can take actions that can reduce their budget in different ways. Our topic in this blog post will be how can IT departments reduce IT budget and costs.

How to Reduce IT Costs?

• Drop Long-Term Plans, Start Tomorrow
• Examine Your Accounts and Expense Assets Well
• Try to Do It All at Once
• Rent Instead of Buying
• Measure the Cost of Outsourced IT Services
• Use an IT Asset Management Software

Drop Long-Term Plans, Start Tomorrow

If the issue is the budget, you must first decide whether your planning will be long-term or short-term. If you want your organization and employees to continue their work with satisfaction from the cuts you make, you need to choose some ways that will make everyone happy, lest it might reduce their motivation by seeing an unfruitful result. Short-term plans are very functional in this regard. Make sure you can get the results of your plan within days, weeks, or months. You will have time for long-term plans then.

Examine Your Accounts and Expense Assets Well

One of the toughest jobs in the IT department is covering a process that is difficult to follow due to constant updates to applications or licenses. Therefore, the budget calculation may proceed unevenly. License payments, which are paid behind and cannot be tracked, also complicate the issue a little. For this reason, first, determine all the hardware and software you have and calculate how much of your expenses stand in your current budget. At the end of the day, determine the essentials for your organization by clarifying the software you 'need' to have as well as the software that is not in use. The table in front of you will tell you what to do.

Try to Do It All at Once

While calculating the budget in IT departments, this process is usually not done in one go. Disposing of software and hardware that does not benefit the organization and creating resources for a more efficient business process by adding income to the budget is one of the first options that come to mind for almost everyone. However, the disposal of non-functional assets results from the fact that the decisions at the buying phase were not made clear. It seems as if some software can work in the future, sometimes the decision process hangs on the next periods because performance evaluation of that software or hardware is not made. But in this case, the steps you take while reducing your budget will not provide you with the final picture. For this reason, try to handle this process in one go to see the latest status.

Another issue at this point is to go back and forth between suspending or reducing your software. Suspending may cause a cost that you will encounter again later along with potential additional budgets that you may have to pay during the period of suspending. For this reason, when you are faced with software or hardware that no longer works for you, what you need to do is to give up on it.

Rent Instead of Buying

You may have bone software or hardware used in existing working systems. It doesn't make sense to remove them from the system. We put aside applications and hardware that are of primary importance to your business processes. Of course, if you're going to need them all the time, it might be a more sensible option to buy them. However, some software works for you on a project basis. Purchasing software and hardware that you do not use all the time and that you will have to use from time to time can both create costs while covering their maintenance and fail in the long-term price/performance evaluation. Therefore, renting can sometimes be one of the most economical and effortless solutions.

Measure the Cost of Outsourced IT Services

Businesses invest in IT solutions in line with their needs. So, is this investment limited to just purchasing software? The answer is of course no. Businesses get outsource services in order to use some technologies effectively. This outsourcing service that companies receive creates a consultancy cost for them. For this reason, when measuring technology costs, IT departments should add not only license costs but also outsource service costs to the total expenses. If the license cost of the software purchased by the companies is low but the cost of the consultancy service is high, the companies should look for alternative technologies with a lower total cost, affecting the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) at the end of the day.

Use an IT Asset Management Software

Almost all the items listed above mention the gains you can achieve as a result of closely and closely monitoring your IT assets. Therefore, it is critical, to say the least, to keep track of the IT assets owned by your organization. Since most organizations are not aware of the existence of software that allows tracking of their IT assets, they do this manually. However, details that are open to human error and often get overlooked in the follow-up. To not let that cause material and moral damage, you can minimize possible risks by monitoring your IT assets with software and then deciding the necessary steps to prevent unnecessary payments from your budget. In addition, thanks to IT Asset Management Software that monitors the performance of software and hardware, it is possible for you to make the most effective decisions for your institution.