IT is an oft-forgotten piece of the business management puzzle, meaning it doesn’t always get the same thoughtful budget planning as other departments and business decisions do. While IT has a direct impact on business productivity, effectiveness and function, IT professionals are often expected to work within small budgets that fall short of needs. Working within these budgetary constraints requires smart budget planning. These IT budget planning tips will help you maximize the budget you have so you can do more with less.
Prioritize your must haves — In order to maximize your budget, you need to first list your standard monthly costs and organizational needs. Standard costs are those with little to no wiggle room, things like IT salaries, electricity costs, and any other costs you expect to remain relatively unchanged month to month. Next, make a detailed list of your organizational needs for the year. Which softwares need upgraded? How much storage space do you need to budget for? How much do you expect data storage levels to grow? These two categories will make up the base of your budget and are generally things you’re unable or unwilling to compromise on. As your budgetary priorities, these two categories should be addressed first before the rest of your budget is delegated.
Trim the fat — When budgets are tight, it’s a good opportunity to look at the IT programs and processes you already have in place to see how those items can be tightened up. There are often ways you can save on operational costs and hardware costs. For instance, you may be able to spend fewer IT resources running manual backups by installing an automatic, continuous cloud backup software. This type of change could also allow you to free up additional storage space on your servers in order to improve processing speeds and make room for new data so you won’t have to purchase additional hardware to accommodate the need for more storage space. Generally, using cloud services is a cost-effective opportunity that will allow you to expand your storage needs in a much more affordable way than purchasing new hardware and then supporting the maintenance expenses and man hours required for the upkeep of that new hardware.
Additionally, as you review your budget and the items in your priority list, keep an eye out for any redundant softwares. You should always select your softwares carefully and review them to ensure that every software has its own unique benefit. Some overlap is fine as long as each software serves its own unique purpose, but if one software can do the same work of 2 or 3 softwares, you may want to see which ones can be cut out.
Prepare for disaster — Unexpected expenses are the fastest way to blow your IT budget out of the water. When IT budgets are limited, it’s tempting to stretch every cent to fund your IT initiatives, but every IT budget needs to maintain a contingency fund for disasters in order to avoid the often drastic expenses of data recovery and operational losses that stem from human error, software failure, natural disaster, and device failure.
You should also consider devoting some of your “disaster plan” resources to solutions that will preemptively mitigate data loss and downtime. Any solution that can help you recover your data in minutes, not weeks and allow you to minimize or even completely avoid data blackouts and downtime will pay for itself despite any ongoing investment.
Review last year’s budget — As you plan your new budget for the year, review previous years’ budgets and how actual spending matched up. Did you go over budget, or did you have budget left over? Which unforeseen expenses, software or hardware upgrades affected your budget? Keeping an eye on how your budgetary projections matched up to your actual spending by evaluating trends from previous years can help you manage this year’s budget smarter and more efficiently.
Take advantage of free trials — Free trials are a great way to try out the softwares and tools you need or would like to use while providing your company with a financial incentive for doing so. Below are some free trials to get you started.
While some IT expenses will be out of your control, you can take control of your business’s disaster preparedness, ability to recover data and reduce downtime, while minimizing the manual resources typically devoted to this task by investing in an affordable and reliable cloud backup solution.
Nordic Backup offers complete, automatic and continuous cloud backup solutions for businesses of all sizes — offering unlimited storage retention lengths, unlimited storage space, military grade encryption, and even a zero-downtime solution to data loss for businesses who can’t afford to lose access to data for even a moment.
Take a look at our Server Pro, 30 day free cloud backup trial and our 90 day free trial for Small Businesses cloud backup plans and test drive them with no-risks and no credit card required before you sign up to protect your data from loss and deletion around the clock.
