3 steps to reduce your IT costs
Soroush Pourhadi • As IT is becoming an integral part of organizations the costs of IT are increasing. Many businesses are therefore looking for ways to reduce their IT costs. Here we present 3 tips to reduce your IT costs!
Step #1: Map your IT environment
IT environments consist of software and hardware assets, licenses, servers and user accounts to mention a few. Before you can begin to lower your costs you have to be aware of the exact components that your IT environment consists of. Larger organizations have several teams to take care of various parts of the infrastructure. Smaller organizations, however, have one or a couple of people who are responsible for all components of the IT infrastructure. Regardless of how you divide the responsibilities the probability that you have a total insight into all changes that are occurring in your IT environment is quite small.
The first step to reduce your IT costs is therefore to carefully map your IT environment so that you know the exact components that it is constituted by. Here you can also get to know which parts are cost bearers.
Step #2: Identify dependencies
The components of the IT environment do not exist in a vacuum. On the contrary most parts of your IT infrastructure are dependent on each other. You can identify dependencies by asking questions such as: What will happen if we remove this server from our production environment? or What are the consequences of merging these two databases?
To investigate dependencies will simplify making decisions in regards to which components no longer contribute. By understanding the consequences of your actions you can make wiser decisions.
Step #3: Start to optimize and reduce your IT costs!
Now that you are aware of which components you are working with and how they relate to each other you can start to prioritize and optimize. Now you can get a better insight into which user accounts that are no longer used but still are linked to licenses. Other common situations are discovering databases that have never been used or physical servers that are just collecting dust.
Finding ways to effectively integrate and automate these three steps can seem difficult. On a positive note there are efficient tools which can help you! vScope automatically maps and streamlines your IT environment in just minutes so that you will only have to pay for assets that you actually use. With vScope you can create tailor-made reports and analyzes of your data and get suggestions for improvement which will better equip your IT organization for the future.
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