Network Solutions Unlimited Blog

When budgeting capital for your company’s technology, it isn’t always simple to know how much to allocate. In fact, a lot of times it can be a convoluted and troublesome experience. Our consultants spend quite a bit of time and effort working out workable budgets for our clients and today, we thought we would talk about how we come about our figures to comprehensively support a business’ technology.

We just wanted to provide a public notice that Microsoft intends to increase the price of its Microsoft 365 and Office 365 offerings. If your business relies on these tools in its operations, you can expect to see your costs for them go up, regardless of where they are sourced from.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, we can help you get the greatest mileage out of these solutions… potentially by introducing you to capabilities that you have yet to take advantage of.

Most modern businesses are using information systems to accelerate their profitability. In fact, small and medium-sized businesses are expected to spend over $650 billion in 2021. The question becomes what technologies are they spending their money on, and are they objectively the right investments to make? Today, we will unpack these questions by highlighting two investments that many businesses are pursuing.

A survey from Splunk and Enterprise Strategy Group indicates that organizations tend to invest a significant amount of their capital into cybersecurity. Even more interesting is that 88 percent of respondents in this survey reported that they would increase these investments, with 35 percent reporting that they will be substantial. What other insights can we glean from this survey?

Millions of businesses are being affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. As a result, it may not surprise you that you will have to adjust your budget to accommodate the massive amount of changes that we will see when the outbreak is handled and everyday life begins to normalize. Today, we thought we’d take you through some of the financial challenges your business is sure to have to deal with when the stay-at-home orders lift.

Running a business isn’t cheap, which results in budgets becoming strained under their operational needs. A major contributor to this strain is often the security-focused line items. However, there are a few means and methods to getting the most out of your security budget.

When it comes to making progress on your organization’s future, your IT budget presents your business with a major roadblock. We bet that it would feel great to eliminate the stress associated with your IT budget. Here are three ways that you can plan for your business’s future and keep that IT budget slimmed down.

Microsoft has planned an increase in the price of its software offerings Microsoft 365 and Office 365, and make no mistake, it will impact your business in some way whether you are ready or not. We are writing this blog to share information that you might find important about this price increase so you can plan to get the most out of your software moving forward.

Your operations are, more or less, contingent on your budget. As such, your business will rely on its budget to guide it fiscally through the next year of operation. Unfortunately, IT resources care little about your budget, and you can see this in how unpredictable it can be. We’ll discuss ways that you can keep your IT budget from breaking the bank, as well as how you can improve success over time through proper management of your IT assets.

When an organization implements new software solutions, they are usually trying to either replace deprecated applications or find a solution to a particular problem. These solutions are often implemented without regards to the older software, and they’ll just collect dust on the network until someone decides to remove them. These unnecessary apps could be wasting precious time and resources for your business. In fact, up to 38 percent of enterprise applications aren’t being used on business networks.

In more specific terms, 30 percent of applications went unused, while only eight percent were used infrequently--less than once a month. A recent study by 1E claims that between the United States and United Kingdom, $34 billion is lost every year on unused or rarely used software solutions. Furthermore, the typical large enterprise could lose up to $7.4 million every year on unnecessary software solutions. While it must be mentioned that small companies won’t waste nearly this much, it’s still important to realize wasted resources when you see them. Software licenses aren’t cheap, and if they’re set to automatically renew, you could be wasting plenty of assets on software that you don’t even use.

Granted, it’s easier said than done to discover which applications your business uses, and those which it doesn’t. Unless you have an internal IT department that manages your organization’s technical assets, you could accidentally be renewing software solutions for apps which you barely use at all. Thus, it’s your responsibility to put a stop to it, and soon.

Through a comprehensive network audit, you can find ways to improve your infrastructure, be it identifying bottlenecks or discovering resources allocated toward apps that you don’t use or need. If your network is chock-full of unused and unnecessary applications, you can use a network audit to discover where they are and to jumpstart your network cleanup procedure.

Network Solutions Unlimited can perform a network audit that takes a comprehensive look at your IT infrastructure and identifies weaknesses that can be shored up. For example, it can identify bottlenecks or unnecessary resource allocation that can help you streamline operations. Furthermore, we can introduce you to new and improved solutions that can completely replace or consolidate your current assets into a more budget-friendly option.

It’s also necessary to mention that you should only be paying for software licensing on solutions that you actually use, and to keep tabs on when licenses expire. It’s usually better to pay as you need them, as something could come up and completely replace it somewhere down the line. If you outsource remote monitoring and maintenance through Network Solutions Unlimited, we can keep an eye on your network in real time and automatically issue updates to your software solutions as they are released. Furthermore, we can act as a single point of contact for your software vendors, so you only have to go through us to renew your software licenses. This takes away the pain of contacting multiple software vendors, which can be a time-consuming and downright annoying process.

To learn more about network audits, remote monitoring and maintenance, or vendor management, reach out to us at (217) 428-6449.