Reducing IT costs or Investing: How to solve this false dilemma?
Companies today are faced with a dilemma in the management of their IT costs: should they reduce costs and limit investments or, conversely, should they invest to restart their business faster than their competitors and stand out in a market under stress?
In reality, this is not so much of a dilemma. There are solutions that can significantly reduce costs. Enough to enable you to invest in the deployment of high value-added digital services, adapted to new consumption and service modes. As you will have understood, it is not in digital marketing or online services that you should reduce your costs today. Visibility on the web and the digitalisation of services are essential!
3 ways to reduce costs ...
Many companies have already taken action to limit the financial impact of the crisis. Here are 3 ways, tested and validated by our customers, which will get you an important and fast ROI.
In all 3 cases, the pay-per-use model allows you to have a clear and transparent view on your expenses, while avoiding heavy and sometimes unexpected investments.
Migrating to the Cloud can reduce infrastructure costs by up to 50% with a ROI in less than 6 months.
1. Migrating your infrastructure to the Cloud
Our customers' experience shows that the cost savings are between 10 and 50% when migrating to the cloud and the return on investment (ROI) is typically less than 1 year. An initial analysis phase provides a quick, upstream view of the financial gains, ROI and the different phases of the project.
One of our clients - a public organisation in the Brussels region - recently chose to move almost all of its applications to Azure, the Microsoft Cloud. Thanks to innovative tools, the migration was carried out "on the fly", in 3 months, without any impact on the business and without any service interruption.
This organization is now reaping significant benefits from this project: a reduction of nearly 50% in infrastructure costs with a ROI in less than 6 months.
Not to mention the gain in terms of agility. The deployment of a new server went from several weeks to just a few hours and this has considerably accelerated the company's digital transformation. It is now able to evolve its offer towards online services with higher added value.
The development of online services and commerce requires speed, agility and innovation, which only cloud computing can provide. It allows you to deploy solutions that will be the foundation of your new digital services.
2. The outsourcing of IT infrastructure management
Outsourcing the management of your information system is seen as a way to guarantee its reliability and security. Did you know that it also allows you to potentially reduce its costs by up to 20%?
Concerned about the continuity of their activities in all circumstances, some companies have decided to switch to a SOC (Service Operations Center). It appears that these organizations are better prepared for the situation we are experiencing today. Indeed, IT departments have been able, from the very beginning of the crisis, to focus their efforts on developing new online services or adapting existing tools knowing that their infrastructures were managed by professionals following the best market practices.
Outsourcing the management of infrastructure allows you to benefit from the latest generation of tools, such as artificial intelligence, API Driven solutions or proactive monitoring, to guarantee a quality service. Thanks to proactive maintenance and monitoring, performance management, security (anti-virus, patches), backups, incidents and automation. Everything is designed to ensure the continuity of your activities in all circumstances.
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3. Outsourcing Application Maintenance
When you want to have a real visibility on your costs, the outsourcing of application maintenance is a plus. It allows you to have a cost defined in advance by a contractual relationship with your TMA (Third Party Application Maintenance) service provider and to plan deliveries with him according to a predefined methodology. Whether wholly or partially, outsourcing application maintenance frees up internal resources for activities with higher added value.
More than ever, maintaining its website is nowadays a necessity and a requirement for any company, whatever its size. At one of our clients, in the retail sector, we were able to observe that the maintenance of a website is a necessity and a requirement for any company, whatever its size. At one of our clients, in the retail sector, we have noticed that outsourcing the maintenance of its websites has allowed us to guarantee better response times, to optimize SEO and to develop a real reactivity with regard to customer expectations.
IT departments today must not only reduce costs, but also bring more and more value to the business with fewer and fewer resources. To cope with this pressure, it seems that a change of culture is underway within IT departments, which now prefer to outsource skills that are not part of their core business to better focus on their strategic missions.
Tips to make cost reduction go hand in hand with performance increase
In these cost-cutting projects, do not neglect aspects that will also be benefits in a crisis context that requires a lot of agility.
- Make this transition with the best standards on the market, whether in the choice of Cloud solutions or the methodology applied for outsourcing.
- Choose highly available solutions
- Set up a proactive 24 x 7 monitoring system that provides better resilience
- Taking advantage of these new approaches to enhance security