Your 2021 Budget for IT

With all the business world changes over the last 6 months, you may not have had time to think about budgeting for next year. I certainly feel for those with off-calendar years that have already budgeted for the next year with so much uncertainty.

But we can help!

We are seeing 4 areas arising in businesses that you should consider for your next year’s budget.

1.Diversity of your Budget:

Over the last couple of years, the push from IT has been in the area of security. As cybercrime is still on the rise, security software implementation will continue to be the biggest spend in most IT budgets. But now, with social distancing and work from home, the hardware and infrastructure to these areas also needs to be considered. If you are going back to the office, you will probably need to social distance your employees, have flex or work from home policies, and you will most certainly want your employees working on your hardware, not their own. In all this, there may be some money saved if you are implementing proper WFH policies, which comes in the form of less need for office space. We have many clients reducing their office footprint while maintaining the social distancing requirements simply because they now know their employees can work from home effectively.

2. Improvements in Asset Management

And since your employees will be flex or WFH, you need a better way to track the assets that belong to the office. Computers in any size company can easily disappear, get lost, or otherwise vanish. You need to be able to track those assets, and there are many tools to do this. Chief among them is basic Remote Management Software, which all good IT companies have already been using for years. The trick will be check-in and check-out of hardware which will need to be managed through online forms or documentation of some sort, and a company policy should be put in place to accomplish this.

3. Vendor Accountability

As budgets tighten, Vendors will have to be more on their game to prove their worth. Too many vendors have been skating by and in times like these, companies look to see what they really need and what is extraneous and can be done without. We recommend you review all of your vendors to see what they are billing you, is their service necessary, and are they performing at an exceptional level. If you are not receiving the services you need, it may be time to look elsewhere.

4. Revisiting Aging Assets

We review this on a quarterly basis with our clients. Aging assets can bring your business to a standstill. They run slower, are more likely to fail, and can cause employee downtime while things get fixed or replaced. If you have computers, servers, and infrastructure over 4 years of age it is time to start looking at replacing them. As fast as technology advances, systems older than 4 years of age are far less efficient and may be slowing your company down just by utilizing them.

There are of course, other areas you need to think about when doing your budget, these are only a few, but they are what is at the top of mind for many of our companies and what we hear other businesses across the US are considering.

If you are concerned about your companies budget and would like a free evaluation and pointers of what we see you may need to focus on, contact me at sales@acaciait.com or 520-751-0888 and ask for Greg.