Ways to Reduce IT Spending Cost for Your Small-Medium Business

We all know that running a small or medium-sized business means there are a lot of things you can’t do that large corporations can only do, such as have their own IT department and technical department. Of course, you still need some sort of IT infrastructure since computers are an essential part of any business, especially startups and those still in the stages of growing pains. So, how do you trim down the numbers without sacrificing so much and risk losing the business?

If you’re looking for ideas on how to reduce IT spending without risk of losing the forward progress of your business, these tips might come in handy.

Learn about and use open source

You can save a lot of money when you don’t have to dole out precious funds for licensing fees to Microsoft and other third parties. And don’t ever think that using open source applications will move your business backward. On the contrary, many startups today are adopting open source in wholesale fashion because it is the technology of the future, and it’s also reliable, scalable, secure, and ready to serve nearly every need you have.

Shift to virtualize your servers

Instead of constantly repairing and replacing those aging servers, why not go virtual instead? You’ll save a lot of money on hardware or buying new computers, and your backups will be much easier while and failover will be almost non-existent. Add to this the fact that maintenance on your virtual server farm will be greatly streamlined, and you’ll arrive with the same conclusion as many IT pros have seen for themselves, in that, virtualization is always a win-win situation.

Prioritize your spending

Prioritizing is especially important for fixed spending, especially for those things that your business can’t do without. In fact, this should be one of the first things you do when faced with a small and fixed budget. Go through it line by line and prioritize the items you can’t do without. Then take them off the table and move on to what you can do without. While you’re prioritizing, make sure the spending on your priority item is really in existence. If item A is a priority, make sure the budget you have earmarked for item A is accurate. If you think you need to adjust on anything, then do so at once.

Outsource to data centers

If you’ve been spending a lot of money on legitimate licenses, but that is costing you a higher percentage of your budget than you deem necessary, migrate from a local server to a hosted server. Plenty of those services are available and they will save you money. You can also migrate away from that costly local backup solution and move it to the cloud since many data centers offer that as well.

Seek good advice from others

Seek the opinion of others who were affected by IT change, especially from your friends. They will give you key insight as to what works and what should be changed.