10 Ways to Prevent IT Support Costs From Consuming Your Budget

10 Ways to Prevent IT Support Costs From Consuming Your Budget
By Sadie Hawkins

 

Your IT is essential to your business, but without the proper support, your firm is only one technical mishap away from real trouble. Making your IT support a priority means that costs can quickly grow out of control, eating up your IT budget. Think of your support costs as a garden - if you don't keep it in check, it'll continue to grow. It's not always obvious how you can save money and maintain high levels of support.

IT Support costs in context

If your organisation has been around for a while, the chances are that your current IT infrastructure is at best, complex and at worst, unmanageable. We adopt new systems in good faith - to help our organisations grow or to keep customers happy. The problem is that the new systems can vie with legacy software, leaving your IT processes in a mess. For every new system, maintenance and support costs creep up accordingly. We're soon left with a huge bill and it can be hard to choose where to cut, to keep costs within budget.

Simplifying your IT Support framework

From medium enterprises upwards, roles can overlap, leading to confusion about responsibilities. Staff can end up treading on one another's toes and key tasks can slip through the net. For example, Service Delivery and Operations want a simple service-level agreement from preferred suppliers. IT directors and CFOs seek increased productivity and cost efficiencies. Data Centre managers need to focus on reliability, consistent uptime and uninterrupted service, regardless of platform. CTOs may be seeking new technologies to develop overall service proposition. Each of these is a competing priority to be met, and selecting a single approach represents a significant challenge. It's possible to meet the challenge, but deliberations, research and shifting priorities may result in a mutated outcome. You need a single person to take responsibility for optimising your approach to IT support.

Pruning back the costs of your IT Support

Given these challenges, is it actually possible to cut outlay and maintain a high quality of service? The good news is that it's not only possible, but can actually improve service whilst still cutting costs. As with any crucial decision, there are a number of key considerations to weigh before deciding which choices to make. On the next two pages we have given our top 10 points to consider; so enjoy our insider industry advice on streamlining services and keeping on top of the money:

1. First establish the costs for maintaining the right level of support on multiple products (in and out of vendors' warranty). Remember, ad hoc support will often be more expensive so consider the potential benefits of different contract coverage.

2. Support contracts need to be easy to maintain. Are you given a single point of contact? Are they easy to get a hold of? If you are finding the communication bad at the sales level then consider whether this will improve later or not.

3. If you need a guaranteed fix time rather than just guaranteed response time then your SLA will be quite different. Look out for different options and weigh these up against the price.

4. Some IT support contracts require you to maintain spare parts and maintain your own data backup, which can tie up your capital. To avoid nasty surprises check what is included in your contract and what is expected of you.

5. A multi-vendor solution may lead to resource issues as you will need to raise multiple separate support tickets to manage any issues. A single vendor solution may be much simpler, but ensure that your chosen supplier has the broad knowledge base to deal with almost any problem.

6. Your vendor warranties can be costly to renew, especially if their renewal date coincides with others'. A good single IT support supplier may be able to provide out of warranty cover for much less than the cost of renewing each warranty individually.

7. IT support suppliers and individual vendors can get carried away with technical jargon. To avoid confusion and frustration try and find a support supplier who speaks your language.

8. One of the key things businesses need to look out for in an IT support supplier is flexibility. Will they help modify and adapt your support contract based on any new requirements or equipment?

9. Are there associated ongoing costs of keeping your team accredited in the relevant software? If so, find out what these costs are and how often the accreditations will need updating as these could be a hidden expense.

10. If you don't consider IT support to be a core skill internally you need to consider how you are going to manage your processes, people and systems effectively. This comes down to delineation of duties, but should be far easier to manage with a single supplier, to maintain consistent SLAs.

Orange Information Systems Group provide UK IT Support Services and will engineer a great, tailored package to prune back costs, keep them under control and free up space for future growth. Proper Business IT support is a key component of your business' success and consistency.