IT managers are always under pressure to deliver smooth performance at the lowest possible cost. Recently that pressure has noticeably increased, since inflation has ramped up across large swathes of the world. The price of everything is going up, a lot. IT departments are focusing even more carefully on savings. Fortunately, there is plenty of low-hanging fruit that any IT manager can consider.
1. REDUCE HARDWARE DEPENDENCY
If you’re still maintaining servers to run your core activities, it must be worth seriously considering whether that approach is still providing you with value for money. Almost all business needs can now be fulfilled in the cloud – so you can aim to get rid of all your servers, and therefore a hefty chunk of maintenance costs.
2. AUTOMATE SOFTWARE UPDATES
A massive proportion of an IT department’s time can be taken up by delivering software updates. It’s important from a security point of view that your devices are running all the latest versions. But there’s no need for any of the process to be manual – you can schedule it all to happen outside of production hours.
3. AUTOMATE WINDOWS UPDATES
Similarly, Windows updates need not consume any precious time; all the magic can happen when you’re asleep and nobody’s working. Or if you prefer to set an approval stage, you can do so – but whenever you need to know which patches are in place on which devices, that information should be readily available on one screen.
4. STOP WASTING MONEY ON SOFTWARE YOU DON’T NEED
When budgeting time comes round each year, and Heads of Department tell you what their software requirements are, it’s rare for anyone to tell you they need less of something, but common to tell you they need more. It needn’t be difficult for those discussions to take place in full possession of the relevant facts: if you’ve paid for 100 expensive licences but you can see in real time that you’re only using 30, then get rid of 70.
5. STOP TRAVELLING TO SUPPORT CALLS
Remote connect has been embedded in typical IT support processes for a while now, so if you’re still trekking around various buildings on your site, or even driving to different sites, it must be worth a look at endpoint management solutions that include remote connect as standard.
6. DON’T WASTE A SINGLE KWH OF ELECTRICITY
This one might not fall directly into IT’s cost centre, but still there are big contributions you can make to cutting your organisation’s overall energy bill. It’s now easily possible to put in place power management plans that reduce the consumption of your workstations, without any negative impact on user experience.
7. CUT OUT LOADS OF HELPDESK TICKETS
If you use a reboot-to-restore solution which returns any workstation to its original state upon restart, you’re likely to find that a huge slice of helpdesk tickets disappears – a restart is often all that’s needed.
8. PREVENT HARDWARE DEGRADATION
A further benefit of reboot-to-restore is that it significantly reduces the effect of hardware degradation. Your workstations themselves are extremely expensive, so you want to get full value out of that massive investment. Each time a user starts a session, they’re doing so unencumbered by all the junk that clogs up a machine over time – and can still preserve all their work by syncing to a cloud drive.
Faronics Cloud is a complete endpoint management solution that will cut your IT costs in each of these eight ways, with zero downtime. The potential saving in just one area could be enormous, but multiply up and you’re recouping some serious cash.
