Technologies to handle budget sappers

At a time when IT budgets are being slashed, the most logical thing to do is to optimize the existing IT infrastructure. This is the time to study your IT infrastructure and see how to extract the most from it. There are several technologies available for the job, and we'll devote the rest of this story talking about them. Before we do that, it's important to understand that cost savings are not attained by cost cutting alone. In order to achieve some cost savings, you might actually have to invest in certain technologies. You just have to be able to evaluate the cost savings vs the upfront payment that you make.

Use SaaS wherever feasible: Till now, Software as a Service had been considered mostly for SMBs. However, with the economic downturn, even larger enterprises could consider using certain types of services to save costs.

Use more digital communication: Instead of picking up the phone and calling people everytime you want to talk to them, try sending them emails or bringing them to an online chat session. This can help if the people you need to interact with are located in multiple geographies. Of course, at this stage you might also want to evaluate using IMs for voice communication and weigh the savings against bandwidth consumption.

Encourage working from home: Many MNCs have already introduced this culture in their organization to save costs. Maybe you should also evaluate it. Maybe the sales team could be kept out on the field and made to report in office once a week. Or the marketing department could work out of home with a good Internet connection.

Bring your own laptop: Some organizations even encourage employees to bring their own laptops into the organization. This way, they don't have to purchase additional hardware for them.

Re-negotiate existing SLAs: If you haven't done this till now, then it's essential to get cracking on it. Just as your organization would be taking measures to retain its key customers, your vendors would also do every possible thing to retain you (if you're important enough for them). So, this is the perfect time to re-negotiate existing contracts and SLAs, and try to get more for the same amount that you're shelling out to your vendors.

Use Open Source and free software: This point is always debatable because there are pros and cons to using either commercial, open source, or free software. So at the very least, you first need to get a broad idea of the definition of each. Commercial software, as the name suggests is what you have to pay for, and you usually purchase licenses for it as per your requirement.

Open Source software, by its definition implies that you have access to the source code of the application you're deploying. This can help in situations where you'd like to modify the application as per your requirements. Open Source is not necessarily free. You will definitely have to pay for its support. If you use open source software that can be freely downloaded from the Internet, then you'll end up spending on providing support for it. So, if your existing IT manpower has never used it before, then you'll need to invest time and money in training them.

Once that's done, you'll end up training the users to use it. Nevertheless, Open Source and free software can be considered as a good option during the slowdown to avoid large upfront initial investments.

Outsource your server room: One option that is becoming popular is to outsource your entire server room infrastructure to a data center, and access everything remotely over a leased link. You save the cost of real estate for setting up and provisioning for a server room. You save on the cost of manpower to manage it. You also save a lot of other direct costs, such as power consumption for IT equipment, air-conditioning, etc. As data centers are built for 24x7 operation and very high uptimes, you're unlikely to face a hardware failure. Hence, if you're a mid-sized or small organization, then you might like to explore this as an option to cut your costs.

Desktop management: This is one of the biggest operational expenses in an organization, and also the most troublesome with users screaming blue murder every time the help desk delays resolving their problem.

What you need to look for is software that can help resolve it. Reduce calls to the helpdesk by making your service desk more efficient. Ensure that all employees turn off their PCs when leaving home from work. Not only that, but also make sure they switch off the main switch where the PC has been plugged in so that all devices connected to the PC are turned off. Usually, one sees monitors in sleep mode, or mice with fancy lighting inside them turned on, even though the PC has been shut down. All of this wastes a lot of electricity and should always be avoided.

Use CCTV cameras: This comes in handy for more than security. You can use it to keep a tab of your employees to see who's taking how many breaks, spending more time than usual on the phone, etc. It leads to productivity enhancement.