Tip of the Week: Fixing Your IT Without Breaking the Bank

As the business world remains restricted in their operations, costs have been a consideration that organizations need to put some serious thought into. Fortunately, there are many ways that you can invest in technologies that significantly benefit your business operations without breaking the bank. Let’s go over five ways to maximize your benefits, without maximizing your investments.

Use SaaS (Software as a Service)

Let’s make one thing clear: software is a critical tool that your business will use each and every day, so you want to make sure that you are providing your team members with the best available tools possible. With the old-fashioned way of acquiring software, this wasn’t always easy, and certainly wasn’t cost effective as it required you to pay large sums of money up front.

What’s more, what you got tended to be what you got.

However, SaaS (short for Software-as-a-Service) changes that. As a cloud-based service, SaaS provides you with a set number of instances of a software title for your team to use, paid through an ongoing monthly subscription cost. Now, this helps you in multiple ways.

First off, it changes what would once have been a single capital expense into a predictable operational expense, which greatly simplifies your budgeting. This can deliver significant benefits to businesses of all sizes, but particularly benefits those businesses that are smaller in size.

Avoid Spending Sprees

Just as most business owners will try to get the most return as possible out of their investments before making any new ones, it can often also be tempting for a business owner to want to dive right in and improve everything all at once when necessary. This strategy isn’t effective, as changes can be challenging to embrace individually—never mind en masse.

A wiser strategy would be to fully embrace and implement each improvement separately, building one up upon the other. This will help you to see the full advantages of everything you adopt and avoid overinvesting in your technology.

Train Your Team

All the new solutions in the world won’t help your business if your team members don’t know how to properly put them to use. You need to prioritize teaching your team about how to use the tools you’ve provided them to do their jobs, including any new hardware and software solutions. Otherwise, you run the risk of your employees not seeing the benefits and internally rejecting the new in favor of the old.

Of course, this kind of training will take more than one seminar. To maximize the impact you have, make sure that your training takes place periodically, following up with your employees and offering them with support. This will help improve your ROI, as your money is going that much further.

Check Prices as Time Passes

Markets fluctuate, which means that there are better times to invest in certain solutions over others. A lot of solutions tend to start off at high prices when they debut, but gradually decrease as time passes. Consider video conferencing: while it once required a significant investment into the infrastructure needed to support it, it is now far more accessible through its native support on most modern devices. So, rather than jumping on the bandwagon the instant a new technology is available, it sometimes makes sense to hang back until after the early adopters make their move and the faltering demand allows the price to ease.

Invest Wisely

Finally, let’s discuss perhaps the most important means of getting the most out of your investments: making sure that the technology that you adopt is directly supporting your operational needs. Weigh out the potential outcomes of each of your proposed improvements… which one offers the most benefits to you, which would have the largest impacts on your processes? Establish which of your options delivers the most to you and prioritize that one. This is perhaps the most straightforward way to stretch your operational investments just that much more.

Network Solutions Unlimited is here to help you make the most of your technology through our managed services and support solutions. Learn more about what we offer by calling (217) 428-6449 today.