Every good business model gives a great deal of consideration to cost efficiency and every good business owner reviews this regularly to prevent over-expenditure on unnecessary items, increasing your revenue.
Today business owners are turning to IT to improve their cost efficiency. In this article, we discuss some of the ways you can utilise technology to save your business money:
1. Utilising the Cloud
The cloud is one of the most efficient platforms to come out of the latest technological revolution, with its ability to save time, money, and accessibility.
The cloud reduces the amount of hardware you need for your business to operate. This not only saves you money on your initial investment, with its fixed fee, pay for what you need pricing, but also saves you on upkeep costs as less hardware equals less troubleshooting, saving time and repair costs. Furthermore, the cloud updates and maintains its server so you don’t have to, again saving time and money as well as stress and pressure.
The cloud is also vital for hybrid/remote working. Let’s be fair, where would we have been without it when the pandemic hit? Was your business one of the ones that lost time and resources moving everything over to the cloud last minute? A study by North-Western University and Berkeley Lab has shown that cloud computing is 93% more energy-efficient than on-site computing, reducing both your costs and your carbon footprint.
2. Budgeting
We might sound like we’re trying to reinvent the wheel here, but many businesses fail to budget effectively for their IT needs.
As always, a budget helps you to better understand where your money is going as well as keep you on track. This in turn gives you an insight into what’s working and what isn’t for you.
Having a budget also allows you to produce financial forecasting and identify any problem areas before they occur as well as evaluate the necessity of your current spending, allowing you to focus your finances where they are most needed.
3. Automation
One of the biggest benefits of using automated systems is the time it can save you. We all have those lists of things that are necessary but eat up a significant amount of time. Reducing your amount of human labour allows you to allocate your resources to activities that generate more revenue for your business, or activities that simply are more fun!
If set up correctly, automation can also eliminate human error, no more emails not sent on time.
You can also utilise Business Intelligence automation to complete your data analytics, allowing you to monitor performance, progress, and trends with a greater speed than ever before. This in turn gives you the opportunity to adapt to these variables faster.
4. Training
If there is one need every single business has in common, no matter what type of business it is, it’s cyber security awareness training. With human error a key factor in network breaches you can’t afford not to have regular training in this field.
No matter how well technology evolves, it, unfortunately, means that the threat of cyber-attacks also grows with it both in number and complexity. Your workforce needs to be aware of the changing nature of threats to be able to identify and prevent them from affecting your business.
5. IT Support
As we discussed in our previous post, outsourcing your IT support can have several benefits, with cost reduction at the forefront. Managed Service Providers are significantly cheaper than a full-time IT support manager and accompanying team and can often have more expertise and be on hand at any time.
Hopefully, we have given you a good starting point to consider how to better manage your IT costs. If you’d like more information on how we can help your business specifically, you can contact us here today!
