1.  Be a bore – plan and budget

Budgeting
your IT environment for your company is boring, and reconciliation is even
dangerous sometimes. But the fact of having a budget almost guaranteed to
protect you from:

  • cutting costs for the development of hardware
    and software park (although there are quarterly optimizations, you can defend
    your position there)
  • dissatisfaction of the financial director or
    accounting at the time of purchase or rental of another element of
    infrastructure
  • manager anger over unplanned spending.

Budgeting
is necessary not only in large companies – literally in any. Gather the
requirements for software and hardware from all departments, calculate the
required capacities, take into account the dynamics of the number of employees
(for example, your call center or support increases during the busy season and
decreases in the free season), justify the expenses and develop a budget plan
by periods ( ideal – for months). Thus, you will know exactly how much money you
will receive for your resource-intensive tasks, and optimize costs.

2. Use the budget
correctly

After the
budget has been agreed and signed, there is a big temptation to redistribute costs
and, for example, push the entire budget into an expensive server on which you
can deploy all DevOps with monitoring and gateways 🙂 In this case, you may
find yourself in a resource shortage mode for the rest tasks and get overruns.
Therefore, focus solely on real needs and business tasks, for the solution of
which computing power is needed.

3. Upgrade the server on
time

Outdated physical
servers, as well as virtual ones, do not bring any benefit to the organization
– they raise questions in terms of security, speed and intelligence. You spend
more time, effort and money to compensate for the missing functionality, to
eliminate security problems and so on.

By the way,
I have often come across situations when the server in the office was a
completely unjustified solution: most small and medium-sized companies can
solve all problems on virtual capacities and save a lot of money.

4. Optimize the work of
ordinary users

Encourage
all your users to use infrastructure carefully. Here are examples of typical user side
overruns:

  • Installing unnecessary applications on the
    principle of “for the whole department” – users ask to have the same software
    as a colleague, because it is necessary or simply they create a request like “7
    Photoshop licenses for the design department”. At the same time, four people work
    in the design department with Photoshop, and the remaining three use it once
    every six months. In this case, it is better to purchase 4 licenses, and 1-2
    tasks per year to solve with the help of colleagues. But more often this story
    happens with office software (in particular, MS Office, which absolutely
    everyone needs). In fact, the vast majority of employees can get by with open
    source editors or practical Google Docs.
  • Users take up virtual resources and
    methodically use all the leased capacities – for example, testers like to create
    loaded virtual machines and forget to at least turn them off, the developers
    also do not do this. The recipe is simple: leaving, close everything 🙂
  • Users use the company’s servers as a global
    file storage: upload photos (in RAW), videos, upload gigabytes of music,
    especially creative ones can even make a small game server at working
    capacities.
  • Dear employees bring pirated software to work,
    and here they are, fines, problems with the police and vendors. Work with
    accesses and policies because they will bring it anyway, even if you will make
    teary speeches in the corporate cafeteria and writing motivational posters.
  • Users consider that they have the right to
    demand any tool convenient to them. So, in my arsenal I had a rental of Trello,
    Asana, Wrike, Basecamp and Bitrix24. Because each project manager chose a
    convenient or familiar product for his department. As a result, 5 support
    solutions, 5 different price tags, 5 accounts, 5 different marketplaces and
    tunings, etc. Looks like you do not need integration, unification and
    end-to-end automation. As a result, in agreement with the general manager, I
    closed this issue, chose Asana, helped to migrate the data, I trained angry
    colleagues myself and saved quite a lot, including strength and nerves.

In general,
negotiate with users, train them, conduct educational program and strive to
facilitate both them and their work. Ultimately, they will be grateful to you
for the order in business, and the leaders – for reducing costs.

5. Combine cloud and
desktop solutions

In general,
based on the fact that I work as a hosting provider too and at the end of the
article I am full of desire to tell you about the cool sale of server
capacities for companies of any scale, I have to wave the flag and shout
“Everyone to the clouds!”. But then I will sin against my engineering
qualifications and will look like a marketer. Therefore, I urge you to approach
the issue wisely and combine cloud and desktop solutions. For example, you can
rent a cloud CRM system as a service (SaaS), and according to the booklet it
costs 15-20$ per user per month. So, in three years you will spend 72000$ for
10 employees, for 4 – 96000, for 5 – 120 000, etc. At the same time, you can
implement desktop CRM by paying competitive licenses for about 40000. and serve
it like the same photoshop. Sometimes the benefits in a period of 2-5 years are
really impressive.

And vice
versa, often cloud technologies allow you to save on hardware, engineers’
salaries, data protection issues (but do not save on them at all!) and scaling.
Cloud funds are easy to connect and disconnect, cloud costs do not fit into the
company’s capital costs – in general, there are a lot of advantages. Choose
cloud solutions when it’s justified in terms of scalability, speed and flexibility.

Consider,
combine and choose winning combinations – I won’t give a universal recipe, they
are their own for every business: someone completely abandons the clouds,
someone builds the entire business in the clouds. By the way, never refuse
software updates (even paid ones) – as a rule, developers of application
software for business roll out more stable and functional versions.

And another
rule for software: get rid of old software that brings less than it consumes
for maintenance and support. There is already an analogue on the market.

6. Avoid duplication of
software

I have
already talked about five project management systems in my IT zoo, but I will
put it in a separate paragraph. If you have abandoned certain software, chose a
new software – do not forget to stop paying for the old one, found new hosting
services – terminate the contract with the old provider if there are no special
considerations. Track employee software usage profiles and get rid of unused
and duplicate software.

Ideally, if
you have a system for monitoring and analyzing installed software, you can see
working duplicates and problems automatically. By the way, this kind of work
helps the company to avoid duplication and repetition of data – sometimes the
search for such issues takes too much time.

7. Combine application
infrastructure and peripherals

But who counts
these consumables: cartridges, flash drives, paper, chargers, printers and so
on. tube discs. But in vain. Start with paper and printers – analyze print
profiles and make a network of printers or MFPs with public access, you will be
surprised how much paper and cartridges are saved and how much the cost of
printing a single sheet will decrease. And no, this is not big economy, this is
an optimization of an important process. Nobody forbids typing guides and
essays on office equipment, but printing books that they don’t want to buy or
read from the screen is too much.

Next –
always have a stock of consumables that you purchase from suppliers at a
discount so that in case of problems with equipment you should not buy too
expensive at the nearest technology store. Keep track of depreciation, keep
records and form a replacement fund – by the way, it’s nice to have a
replacement fund for basic office equipment. Just because you will not be
praised for downtime at work, it is also a loss of money, especially in trading
and service companies.

As for the
applied infrastructure, there are two main cost items: Internet and
communication. When choosing a provider, look at package offers, read the notes
at the tariffs, pay attention to the quality of communication and SLA. Some
administrators decide not to bother and buy, for example, IP-telephony in a
package with a paid virtual telephone exchange, which is also issued a monthly
subscription. Do not be lazy, buy only traffic and learn to work with Asterisk
– this is the best of what has been created in the field of PBX and an almost
hassle-free solution for business tasks of small and medium-sized businesses.

8. Document and create
instructions for employees

This is
necessary. Firstly, it will be easier for you to work, and secondly, the
adaptation of beginners will be seamless. Finally, you yourself will know that
your infrastructure is up-to-date, complete and in perfect order. Compose
safety instructions, short manuals for users, FAQ, describe the rules and
regulations for the use of office equipment. A materially existing instruction
is much more convincing than words; you can always refer to it. Thus, you can
send a link to the document with any relevant question and not accept the
argument “I was not warned”. So you save a lot of money on eliminating errors.

9. Use the services of
outsourcers

Even if you have a whole IT department in your company or a small infrastructure, it is not shameful to use the services of outsourcers. Why not get the services of classy professionals specialized in something complicated, for little money, without buying such a specialist on staff. Outsource part of DevOps, print services, administration of a loaded site, if you have one, support and a call center. Your value will not fall from this, on the contrary, you will receive additional expertise in the field of contacts with third-party contractors.

If your
manager believes that outsourcing is expensive, just explain to him how much he
will have to pay to the dedicated specialist. It really works.

10. Do not get involved in
open source and your development

I’m an
engineer, I’m a developer in the past and I truly believe that it is open
source that saves the world – libraries, monitoring systems, server management
systems, etc. But if your company decides to buy open source CRM, ERP, ECM,
etc., save the ship, it goes to the reefs. Here are the arguments why:

  • open source is poorly supported if it is a
    public repository or is very expensive if it is open source from companies
    (DBMS, office suites, etc.) – you will pay literally for every question,
    request and ticket;
  • an internal specialist for deploying an
    internal open source product will be very expensive due to its rarity;
  • open source improvements can be severely
    limited by knowledge, skills, or even licensing;
  • with open source you do not start for a very
    long time and it will be too difficult for you to adapt it to business
    processes.

Needless to
say, own development is a very long and expensive? From my own experience I’ll
say that it takes three years to work on a working prototype that meets
business requirements and the ability to let users work in it. And only, if you
have a good team of programmers.

So, I’ll
summarize briefly to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything:

  • count money – compare different options,
    consider factors, compare;
  • strive to reduce the time for maintenance and
    user training, reduce the risks;
  • try to consolidate and integrate technology;
  • invest in IT development, do not live with
    outdated technologies – they will use a lot if money;
  • correlate demand and consumption of IT
    resources.

You may ask
– why save someone else’s money, since the office pays? The logical question!
But your ability to optimize costs and manage IT assets effectively is
primarily your experience and your characteristic as a professional.