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A new year means a new IT budget. You could spend time that you don’t have re-structuring your operations, tweaking your networks, cost-cutting infrastructure, and generally cutting corners—all for small percentage savings with no real guarantee.
There’s lower-hanging fruit for cost-optimization.
Rather than expend exorbitant time and effort, you could take more logical and efficient measures that don’t deplete your in-house resources and allow you to see more immediate results.
Here’s how to start the year off on the right foot and get some quick wins.
Make Immediate Room in Your IT Budget
Consider the following alternatives to how you currently leverage and maintain your virtual and physical infrastructure.
Third-Party Maintenance
OEM hardware support increases significantly in cost after EOL is announced. And this seeming monopoly often pressures you to make hard decisions sooner than you would have otherwise—to either pay out for the support premiums or buy new hardware altogether.
However, Third-Party Maintenance (TPM), as reported by Gartner, consistently saves clients 60% off of OEM list prices—with some savings as high as 95%. You receive the same level of support that you are accustomed to receiving from the OEM, and often, these TPM providers have access to a larger pool of new and refurbished equipment because they are more active within secondary markets. Because of this secondary market involvement, they are also able to support your legacy hardware for longer periods, giving you more autonomy over the lifecycle utilization of your hardware. You now get to decide when to implement and decommission rather than be controlled by OEM forced refresh cycle.
IT Asset Disposition
All hardware will eventually wear out and need to be replaced, whether that be physically or effectively due to demanding performance requirements.
And when you make these critical decommissioning decisions, you need to be strategic about when you decide to resell or recycle. IT Asset Disposition experts, for example, can help you determine the utilization of your hardware (helping you get the most out of your infrastructure and simultaneously getting the greatest ROI for each unit). Often, these ITAD experts have a comprehensive understanding of secondary markets, so they will know when and where to sell to help you recover the most value.
ITAD vendors will also be able to determine if a unit needs to be decommissioned entirely. From there, they can provide certified data sanitization services as well as certified green and ISO-level recycling and processing to keep your critical data secure and your company within compliance requirements.
Eliminate Vendor Sprawl
Admittedly, hardware is only part of the story.
While the two methodologies above bring immediate results with the assets you already have, you also need to think about the bigger picture. Full-lifecycle management, for example.
With leaner IT teams, you need to outsource some of your IT tasks. But vendor sprawl brings redundant overhead and services, ineffective communication, and increased logistics. And that means you’re looking at a lot of resource drain for not a lot of profit or efficiency. If you’re looking to make room in your IT budget, consider partnering with a full-lifecycle vendor that can provide all of the above cost saving initiatives as well as other critical on-demand field services.
CentricsIT Helps You Optimize Your IT Budget
CentricsIT is a single vendor solution that provides full IT lifecycle support, with a single bill, and only one relationship for you to manage. We have certified hardware and engineering depots across the globe, and we can scale up or down as you need us. Consider us your “human cloud” workforce solution that provides economical and standardized services for:
- Network and Security
- Datacenter and Applications
- Enterprise Logistics
Preparing Well for the New Year
You don’t have the in-house bandwidth to make these long-term commitments to low-payoff “tweaking” initiatives. So, change how you approach your infrastructure lifecycle management instead and leverage united services from CentricsIT.
As one of the leading SaaS companies in the world, this remote access software company didn’t have the bandwidth to continue juggling a litany of vendors. See why they turned to CentricsIT for a full IT lifecycle management solution.
