Tips on How to Resurrect Your IT Department Budget

Alan Conboy

December 4, 2019

With Halloween and Day of the Dead behind us, the fear of mismanaging budgets for IT departments is a feeling that lingers year-round, so how can IT departments avoid excessive spending and maintain their budgets? By learning how to recognize four of the bad habits threatening your data center budget, you will banish the evil spirits hiding in your IT department and avoid the graveyards haunted by outdated and unnecessary technology trends from the past.

Focusing on the Future Instead of the Present

In the constantly evolving world of IT, it is nearly impossible to predict how a business’ technology needs will look a few years into the future. Solutions and their pricing change frequently, so newer and better technologies might be available at lower prices than their current counterparts. Thus, it is unwise to make assumptions about a business’ future needs when the investment will likely become redundant.

When businesses search for and invest in solutions that are easily scaled up or down, IT departments can buy exactly what they need when they need it. The ability to scale with a faster and larger capacity when necessary is a valuable option that can evolve alongside a business. With this flexibility, businesses can make use of the latest technologies in the future when they become available, thus increasing the impact of their IT infrastructure budget.

Buying From Too Many Vendors

Multiple vendors can also lead to complications and increased costs for IT departments. Since each vendor will have different management interfaces, the documentation, support contacts, trainings, and certifications will also vary. There are also different versions, maintenance, and patch schedules. This creates an entirely incompatible and unstable overall solution, which is almost impossible to keep track of.

While it is important for businesses to remain on the lookout for new vendor technologies that will improve business operations, each of these components does not have to be provided by a separate vendor. Technologies such as servers, storage and virtualization can be combined into a single vendor solution, leading to simplified training, management, and support, as well as lowered costs.

Failing to Upgrade

The technology and hardware used within the IT industry is built with the knowledge that a newer, better replacement will show up on the market in a short amount of time. The constant changes and developments can lead aging equipment and software to turn into a liability at a rate faster than many IT departments can plan for. Businesses should plan to replace technology often, rather than invest in a long-term solution.

With new IT technologies developed to accommodate the needs and demands of an evolving industry, businesses need to know the latest solutions and their benefits in order to best serve their current infrastructure. Deploying older solutions may lead to inefficiencies and higher costs, which will ultimately punish organizations looking to remain competitive against businesses that have implemented modern solutions that are faster and more efficient. When organizations start to understand that IT departments are investments that drive the business forward with improved technology, they will reap the benefits of improved IT infrastructure.

Focusing on the Small Details

While IT professionals were previously able to sort their company’s IT infrastructure into individual components, such as storage, servers, virtualization, backup, and disaster recovery, current IT professionals struggle to see the interactions between components on a larger scale to achieve maximum potential. Unless the entire IT department can think about the whole IT vision, these individual technology components cannot operate efficiently together.

Businesses will benefit from looking for opportunities to simplify and combine these technologies in order to avoid over-specialization by IT professionals. By looking into solutions that combine varying technologies, IT departments create efficiency by eliminating complex and isolated components that would otherwise reduce profitability.

By avoiding the four threats to your IT industry, you’ll avoid your IT department turning into another horror story passed on from one sysadmin to the next. For an industry constantly in flux, it is important for your IT departments to adapt and learn how to do more with less to improve simplicity and efficiency, ensuring poor IT habits don’t affect your business.