XSi's Blog: The Alternative in IT Maintenance & Services

2011 Budget Planning Series: I.T. Consolidation, Maintenance & Monitoring

  

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(This is part 1 of a complete series on Budget Planning in 2011 and beyond)

With a new calendar year comes a new fiscal year, a new set of goals and budget challenges for every department in your organization. While CTOs, CIOs, CFOs, and other c-level executives are working together to maintain or improve vital business services, many of the executives focusing on IT budgets make the understandable mistake of limiting their analysis to capital investments and purchasing decisions. However, more progressive professionals, those looking to get more control over their costs in the long term, are looking to other expenses to keep matters under control.

Purchases are a fraction of the total IT cost

According to Forrester research, less than 25% of IT spending goes to acquisitions, purchases, and IT capital investments. Around 76% goes to the host of other associated costs, such as maintenance, support, hardware moves, consolidations, and more. In order to control the largest costs in your IT department, it is vital that you analyze and plan for the entire asset lifecycle.

Gaining control over IT service budgets

• Moving and Consolidating – Moving and consolidating datacenters, servers, and other equipment drastically reduces IT maintenance and operational budgets. A quality service group will audit and/or commission your entire vital service, then provide a detailed move and consolidation plan. Their plan should include contingencies, in case of emergencies. It should also contain a complete outline of de-installation, move, and re-installation efforts that explains fully how your operational service capacity will be maintained at appropriate levels throughout the entire initiative.

• Maintenance - Most original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) provide maintenance for their hardware, but at relatively high costs for relatively low performance. In addition, they force companies to update functioning hardware as a requirement to continue maintenance service. In order to reduce the total cost of equipment maintenance, look into teaming with a company that will provide faster, multi-brand maintenance and service for your organization, or one that supports legacy equipment. Whatever your needs are, there is an excellent chance that there is a service or maintenance vendor out there that can provide it at more reasonable prices.

• Monitoring - Though building and facility maintenance professionals have been implementing monitoring and preventive maintenance techniques for decades, many IT departments wait for things to stop functioning before they make improvements. This can lead to costly emergency on-site maintenance visits, and in the sometimes unnecessary replacement of equipment (a decision made to get a service up and running as quickly as possible). To reduce the overall cost of maintaining you IT services, design and implementing a modern monitoring program that allows you to maintain equipment, rather than fix and replace it.

Whether you decide to implement changes in-house or team with a 3rd party group, the tips above will help you plan and control your IT budget for this year, and for future years.