Managing Reduced Budgets

 

In these difficult times managing budgets has become a top priority.

 

It is all too easy to look at cancelling projects and making redundancies before actually getting into the finer detail about which areas of expenditure are delivering real business value, and which are just consuming budget for little or no tangible benefit.

 

The IT department is traditionally the first casualty of such budget cuts, as at first glance the IT department does not seem to generate any income (although this is "technically" true, without the IT department none of the other departments would be able to generate, or indeed collect any income).

 

 

 

If you have been tasked with investigating where savings can be made the following areas will be of interest:

 

 

RUNNING COSTS

 

It now costs more to run a computer, than to buy a computer.

 

Depending on the make and model of computers that you use, and the working habits of your staff, you could save between £40 and £120 per year, per PC if you manage the energy usage intelligently.

 

Many organisations have deployed software to automatically shut computers down at a certain time every night, but this is only part of the solution.

 

Most staff do not work non-stop between 9:00am and 7:00pm each evening, they have internal meetings, external meetings, travelling time, telephone conversations and lunch breaks.

 

One Planet Computing focuses not only on the "average" energy consumption of the device, but also monitors the actual activity on each device on an individual basis.

 

For example if one of your employees leaves for a meeting at 1:00pm and forgets to shutdown their computer but your power management solution is not aware of this, you could be wasting 6 hours of electricity waiting for an automatic shutdown at 7:00pm.

 

To find out how much you could be saving, see the calculators located here.


 

 

      
REPLACEMENT COSTS

 

In the past organisations would replace IT equipment every 3 years.

 

For many this has now become 4-5 years as IT departments are being asked to "sweat the assets". Typically the issues around this are the gradual slow-down of systems struggling to cope and a general sense of discomfort and frustration from other employees.

 

One Planet Computing can extend the working life of your existing equipment for another 5-10 years as a modern virtual desktop, or cloud desktop with no loss of performance.

 

In fact 90%+ of organisations will actually see a noticeable performance boost.

 

 

DISASTER RECOVERY

 

IT departments will often have to dedicate a significant portion of their budget to the provision of "redundant systems". In most cases "redundancy" means buy twice as much of everything that is important, just to be sure.

 

As the name suggests, these systems are sat idle (sometimes for years on end) just waiting for a disaster to happen. It is quite common for redundant systems to have become obsolete before they have ever been called into service.

 

The modern generation of Virtual Desktops, Server Based Computing and Cloud Computing allows organisations to provide Disaster Recovery without needing to pay for redundant systems.