We receive quite a few requests from customers on how they can make their IT spending go farther. For most businesses, the state of the local economy has put IT budgets on the bottom of the priority list, and spending in the area of IT has all been halted. Below I’ll outline some areas where you can save some capital and other areas where you should be investing.
How to Save Money!
- Subscription-based licensing: Such as Microsoft Office. If you are a business that employs temporary staff for partial months of the year, a subscription not only frees up the upfront capital required to purchase boxed versions but also allows you to control what license is active. If the staff member leaves the business you can easily log into the office portal and repurpose the license to another member.
- Recycle PC’s: Rotating hardware from power users and less power-hungry staff is a good way to stretch your dollars. If your CAD user needs the latest graphics processor, maybe give his system to your front receptionist who doesn’t use CAD.
- Upgrading Hardware: The average PC hard drive has a life of two to five years. We’ve had great success in replacing spinning hard drive (HDD) with Solid State Drives (SSD). SSD’s offer much faster data access and are much more rugged. A quick swap of your drive and you can usually gain two or more years from that tired workstation.
Where to spend!
- Backup Solution: In todays world of email phishing scams and crypto viruses, having a good daily backup of your business data is critical. March 31st is World Backup Day #WorldBackupDay and while more businesses are embracing daily backups, there are still some who think a USB stick is a reliable backup device. Pay for a good backup product that replicates to at least one other storage source, whether it is Cloud storage or to a secondary NAS.
- Antivirus software: Ensuring the data sitting on your PC and Server is not malicious in nature is the purpose of antivirus software. Without system in place to monitoring the data you could open up avenues for spyware or malware to collect intellectual business information or worse customer data. You have an obligation to your customers to ensure the data you are collecting from them is safe and not being used for nefarious means.
- Verified software: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro for $8.99 off that online auction site? Chances are, if the price is too good to be true, it is. Running pirated software can be costly for businesses, not only in potential fines but also in machine security. Ensure you purchase your machine licenses from a reputable source.
As always we are available to discuss your business needs and can provide a no cost quote for any of the services we offer. Contact us today to see how we can help save your business money.
David Hetherington
David.Hetherington@ITSolutions.ca
