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5 Ways to Optimize Your IT Budget

automation, cloud computing, educate staff, evaluate spending, IT budget, IT Support, Ophtekautomation, cloud computing, educate staff, evaluate spending, IT budget, it support, OphtekOphtek, LLC

Sep 2024

Managing your IT budget is crucial in today’s fast paced business environment. A fter all, technology is becoming more important, but also expensive.

An IT budget allows you to plan your IT expenses for the year ahead, so it needs to be planned carefully. Every cent counts and you want to be able to optimize your IT budget to remain efficient and competitive. This may sound simple, but it presents a major headache for almost every business. You need to determine exactly where you can save money in your budget and which areas need prioritizing for investment. It’s a difficult balancing act, but if you can get it right, you’re guaranteed an effective IT infrastructure.

Optimizing Your IT Budget

To help you get started with optimizing your IT budget, we’re going to share 5 simple ways you can get the most bang for your buck:

Evaluate Existing IT Spending: Over time, your use of IT technology will change, and this often leads to unnecessary spending or a lack of investment in vital services. Therefore, you need to assess your current expenses and focus on the costs which directly impact your day-to-day operations. This will allow you to identify areas where you can make savings e.g. using open-source software such as Google Docs or OpenOffice instead of the subscription-based Microsoft Office.
Embrace Automation: The future of business is automation, and this is never more true than when it comes to IT. By streamlining repetitive tasks, you can reduce manual workloads and reduce your labor costs. A good example of this comes in the form of network monitoring software, this can be used to keep a continuous eye on the traffic flowing in and out of your infrastructure. Anything suspicious can be immediately flagged, and this saves you having to manually monitor your network activity. While there will be an initial outlay in automation software, the long-term savings will greatly enhance your IT budget.
Invest in Cloud Computing: Flexibility is an important part of any budget and cloud computing is the perfect example of this in IT. Using cloud services ensures that your organization only pays for what it uses e.g. a specific amount of storage space for your backups. Cloud computing also reduces the need for physical equipment on your premises and comes complete with minimal maintenance costs. The combined benefits of cloud computing, especially when provided by a single supplier, will quickly streamline your costs.
Optimize IT Support: Rather than handling IT support yourself, why not consider outsourcing this duty to a specialized provider? This minimizes your spending on in-house IT staff and enables you to benefit from remote support services. External providers will be more than capable of maintaining your IT infrastructure and, due to their experience across multiple clients, their expertise will be more varied than in-house staff who primarily work with the same systems every day.
Educate Your Staff: Incorrect usage of your IT resources by staff can quickly generate outgoing costs, so it pays to be mindful of this. So, make sure your staff are regularly trained to use IT equipment correctly and efficiently e.g. only printing in color when necessary. It’s also important that your IT and finance teams are in regular contact with each other to monitor IT spending, so ensure catch-up meetings are scheduled to keep everyone on the same page.

For more ways to secure and optimize your business technology, c ontact your local IT professionals.

The Importance of Quick IT Support Response Times

IT contact numbers, IT infrastructure, IT Support, minimize IT issues, OphtekIT contact numbers, IT Infrastructure, it support, minimize IT issues, OphtekOphtek, LLC

Apr 2024

Every second counts when it comes to IT support, as unresolved issues can quickly become costly. And speed is something which Ophtek prides itself on.

The digital business landscape of the 21^st century is wide-reaching and informs countless business decisions throughout the day. From emails through to data storage and on to cybersecurity defenses, your IT infrastructure is crucial. Therefore, when there’s an issue with your IT systems, you need these to be resolved quickly, otherwise the financial impact – especially with cybercrime – can be significant.

The Impact of Downtime

Anything which creates an issue for your operational processes is going to have a financial impact. Say, for example, your data storage solutions fail, this is going to restrict the amount of data you have available. This could easily impact your operations by disrupting the way in which you retrieve customer data. Deliveries, which require customer details such as delivery addresses, could be put on hold. This scenario would instantly compromise your ability to invoice, with customers unlikely to pay for goods not received on time.

Likewise, if your email server were to become compromised by threat actors, you risk not only exposing your customers’ data, but also losing a major communication channel. This is a double-edged threat and, again, represents a major financial risk. Aside from your customers taking legal action against you for data violations, there’s the fact you could miss key communications from your customers and suppliers.

Every minute of downtime has the potential to push your business backwards, and it’s vital you can counter this effectively.

Minimize The Impact with a Speedy Response

It’s clear that IT is important for organizations to conduct their day-to-day operations, and any disruption to this will have major ramifications. The best way to minimize this is by ensuring you can launch a quick response. This will reduce your downtime and allow your organization to get its business operations back on track. Furthermore, it will minimize any financial risk e.g. allow you to resume order processing and any billing processes. And in today’s competitive business landscape, this is essential.

The best way to plan and execute quick IT support response claims is by partnering yourself with an established IT support provider, such as Ophtek. With a long track record of providing speedy and professional support, we can ensure that any IT downtime is kept to a minimum. Nonetheless, you can still put measures in place to help minimize your IT issues and facilitate our response:

Regular training: IT issues need to be reported, but you need to make sure that your team members know when to identify issues which require an IT professional. A malware threat, for example, always needs reporting, but something minor such as selecting a default printer in Word can probably be dealt with in-house.
Provide contact numbers: the members of your organization need to know who to contact in the case of an IT emergency, so these contact details need to be made available to every member of staff. A simple way of achieving this is by creating a contact in your phone systems, but it’s also a good idea to display a contact number on every user’s desktop.

For more ways to secure and optimize your business technology, contact your local IT professionals.

5 Ways to Prevent Total PC Failures

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May 2017

PCs carry out so many tasks and use a number of different pieces of hardware and software, so the potential for failure is high, but it can be prevented.

Even if there’s just a small failure in one of your PCs tasks, it can create a snowball effect which eventually leads to a total PC failure. And, when this occurs, you’re left with a PC which is unable to contribute to your productivity.

Therefore, it makes sense to pre-empt these major disasters by taking a number of preventative measures, so that’s why I’m going to share 5 ways to prevent and treat total PC failures.

Use a Firewall

If an unauthorized user gains access to your network then they have the potential to bring your entire network to a halt. And, for modern businesses who rely on IT to operate, this is their nightmare scenario; that’s why it’s essential that you have a trusted firewall to operate as your first line of defense.

Make Sure Your Backups Work

It’s a very rare and lucky business which doesn’t experience a total PC failure at some point, so backups are a crucial procedure to ensure that all your data remains safe. However, not all businesses make sure that their backups actually work and, if necessary, are capable of restoring operations. Therefore, by using a test system to regularly perform backups, you can increase your confidence that a total PC failure can be easily remedied.

Install an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)

Businesses have very little control over failures with the power supply, so your put in a tricky position when the power suddenly goes. Thankfully, it’s possible to keep your PCs connected to a UPS which will provide emergency power in the case of a power cut. Although it won’t provide enough power for all your IT equipment to perform indefinitely, it will give you time to carry out essentials and save relevant data safely.

Use Backup Rotation

You shouldn’t rely on just one set of backup materials as, if these become damaged, then it’s impossible to retrieve your data. For example, many businesses use a DVD+RW each day for backing up their data and nothing more. What you need to do, though, is create a backup at the end of the week as well which compiles all this data together. And, just to be extra safe, you should compile all these weekly backup into one monthly backup. This provides three generations of data which you can rely on in the case of a total PC failure.

Carry Out Fresh Installs

PCs can build up junk and unnecessary files over time due to the number of installs and uninstalls which take place. Whilst you can use free applications to clear out some of these files, they’ll never conduct a thorough clean of you system and, in the long term, it can begin to slow down due to what’s known as ‘Windows Rot’. This is why it pays to carry out a fresh install of Windows once a year to prevent your PC from failing on you at the most inopportune moment.

For more ways to secure and optimize your business technology, contact your local IT professionals.

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