Blog / How to get the most out of your technology budget
Here are three ways to ensure your technology budget covers all your bases.
Technology is great, but it can be remarkably expensive, and, in business at least, it’s meant to help improve your bottom line and not blow your budget. Unfortunately too many organizations—businesses, municipalities, clinics, and non-profits alike—don’t fully understand the scope of their technology, and what’s involved in making sure it’s useful and profitable. As a result, it’s very easy to underfund your IT department, and while every department is always going to be asking for more money, making sure your technology budget is put to use properly and covering all major IT concerns has got to be a priority for all organizations. So to help you better understand where you should be spending your precious IT dollars, here are three areas your IT budget needs to address.
- Incidents and accidents
- New and Ongoing Projects
- Refreshing tools and infrastructure
Incidents and accidents
There’s an old saying out there you’ve likely heard before: hope for the best but plan for the worst, and it’s good advice. However, while disaster planning and incident response plans are great and we wholly recommend you have or make one, they’re for, well, the worst situations possible, like suffering a ransomware attack. Unfortunately, there are plenty of other less catastrophic incidents and accidents that can impact employee productivity and hamper your bottom line, including damaged hardware and peripherals (particularly now that plenty of people are packing up their laptops more often to work remotely a few a days each week) and upskilling employees. Admittedly that last one’s not an incident or accident per se, but it’s a good reminder that there are often hidden or unrecognized costs to using technology that needs to budgeted for.
New and ongoing projects
Of course, it’s important that your technology budget allow for new IT projects and currently ongoing ones. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it’s still important to recognize. Failing to properly budget for IT projects often leaves them in disarray, resulting in failed implementations, stressed out employees, and frustrated customers trying to adapt to kludgy or incomplete systems from bad implementations. They don’t even have to be big projects; securing your work network with a VPN is fairly simple and straightforward, but failing to budget for one means leaving your business at risk for longer.
Refreshing tools and infrastructure
While it’s tempting to think of your technology budget as resources for flashy new devices, it’s imperative to remember you have to fund your current systems and their upgrades as well. It’s far too easy to let existing applications and critical digital infrastructure age out, particularly if you’ve never had any problems with them prior to their failure. Many applications and other technology services are offered using the SaaS (Software as a Service) model and include regular updates, but those only work if there’s someone around being paid to perform the patches, and doesn’t include all the other older legacy technologies you may still use but not realize is badly out of date.
Of course, there are plenty of other ways to handle budgeting for technology, but these three use cases can be extraordinarily helpful for directing how funds should be delineated. If you’d like help getting the most value out of your technology budget, contact the IT experts at TRINUS and we’ll be happy to help out as part of our commitment to stress-free IT.
Sincerely,
The TRINUS Team
trinustech.com
