Key industry executives from ManageEngine, HP, Cloud Box, NetApp, Liferay, share their suggestions on how CIOs and IT decision makers need to relook at their annual and quarterly spending plans across hardware, software, security, cloud, and IT operations.
A key approach that CIOs and IT decision makers need to adopt is to focus on simplifying IT infrastructure. This can be achieved by consolidating hardware and software, reducing the number of systems and applications in use, and standardising processes and workflows. By simplifying IT infrastructure, organisations can reduce complexity of their IT operations, which in turn can lead to cost savings.
Another important approach is to adopt a strategic approach to IT procurement. This involves a clear understanding of the organisation’s current and future IT needs. Organisations can identify the most cost-effective solutions that meet their specific requirements, rather than simply selecting the lowest-cost option.
CIOs and IT decision-makers face a near impossible task of curbing costs while keeping up with the transforming their digital landscape. By adopting a smart approach to ITOps expenses, businesses in this region can position themselves strategically for any changes.
However deep cuts in ITOps spending can make businesses fall behind their competitors in the race to digital transformation, innovation, and resilience. In such a competitive landscape, it is essential to balance cost-saving with progress toward digital goals. A pragmatic approach to cost-saving starts with ITOps cost analysis. For instance, analysing the ROI of ITOps expenditure helps with making informed decisions on IT investments and resource allocations.
Hardware procurement and software tool licensing offer a margin for cost-optimisation as well. CIOs and IT decision-makers should adopt cost-conscious approaches to hardware procurement, including selecting low-cost vendor partnerships, renegotiating existing partnerships, customising hardware specifications as per business needs, and ensuring expert inventory management with complete visibility.
Bharani Kumar Kulasekaran, Product Manager, ManageEngine
A pragmatic approach to cost-saving starts with ITOps cost analysis.
CIOs and IT decision-makers face the impossible task of curbing costs while keeping up with the transforming digital landscape. By adopting a smart approach to ITOps expenses, businesses in this region can position themselves strategically for any changes that may come their way.
However deep cuts in ITOps spending can make businesses fall behind their competitors in the race to digital transformation, innovation, and resilience. In such a competitive landscape, it is essential to balance cost-saving with progress toward digital goals.
A pragmatic approach to cost-saving starts with ITOps cost analysis. CIOs and IT decision-makers can control costs by inspecting current IT spending, evaluating benchmarks, assigning business-impact-appropriate expense priorities, and identifying cost-cutting opportunities. For instance, analysing the ROI of ITOps expenditure helps with making informed decisions on IT investments and resource allocations.
Hardware procurement and software tool licensing offer a margin for cost-optimisation as well. CIOs and IT decision-makers should adopt cost-conscious approaches to hardware procurement, including selecting low-cost vendor partnerships, renegotiating existing partnerships, customising hardware specifications as per business needs, and ensuring expert inventory management with complete visibility.
On the software side, CIOs and IT decision-makers should revisit their licensing expenditures. Decision-makers should identify areas of overspending in the currently licensed components and downscale their paid software licensing accordingly.
Existing infrastructure should be optimised for cost savings. This calls for tactical decisions such as consolidating IT, leveraging economical options for platform change without engineering effort, rationalising the tools portfolio, and evaluating the scope for cloud migration.
Automation is another irrefutable cost-saving factor. It helps businesses improve operational efficiency and quality of service while lowering costs and the need for IT procurement. Also, the improved IT consistency, standardisation, and enhanced efficiency achieved with automation are conducive to cost savings.
New projects should be carefully evaluated and taken up based on their criticality and business impact. We are seeing an increasing trend of low-business-impact tasks and fewer critical projects being managed with open-source tools. CIOs and IT decision-makers implementing newer projects or technologies with less business impact and criticality should also consider outsourcing and cloud options.
With these options offering scalability and technical expertise of the outsourced contractors, businesses can ensure cost savings, including the reduced total cost of ownership, TCO. However, decision-makers should carefully consider the cost per unit of service, CPUS, ROI, and service level agreement, SLA terms before making this decision.
Peter Oganesean, Managing Director, HP Middle East
A new approach to hybrid workplace security can reduce operational costs. This requires a move away from perimeter-focused thinking, to focusing on the endpoint for applying protection. Implementing hardware-enforced security features and protection above, in, and below the OS, such as application isolation, is imperative to protect users without impacting on the freedoms that hybrid work allows.
By enhancing remote management and adopting hardware-enforced security, organisations can reduce the risk of cyber threats while unleashing user productivity and consequently lowering the operational costs associated with cyber-attacks.
With the shift to a hybrid model and the lines between the corporate office and employees’ homes constantly blurring, the number of remote endpoints substantially increased. Companies need to ensure that their employees are equipped with the right technology to succeed in these new ways of working and investing in the right tools is quite complex and time consuming, multiple vendors, distributed workers, security concerns, IT support. Cloud-based IT management can help simplify and improve end user device management and deliver a better employee experience.
With the rise of flexible working patterns, securing endpoints such as PCs and printers has become crucial to prevent cyber threats. According to a report by HP Wolf Security, 84% of security leaders say that the endpoint is where most business-damaging cyber threats occur.
Ranjith Kaippada, Managing Director, Cloud Box Technologies
CIOs and IT decision makers need to pave the way for right use of technology to look at both short- and long-term strategies to reduce IT operations cost. Embracing technology is a vital investment, however organisations must also be able to source and implement the right and more innovative technologies.
One of the first approaches would be to move towards digital transformation to automate all time-consuming jobs. Also, virtualising many tasks and partially depending on cloud would be a good practice to follow.
Most operations cannot be worked in an isolated state and requires for organisations to find the right partner of systems integrator and rely on them as their outsourced division. In doing so and handing over several tasks it helps in reducing IT operational costs. But it is also crucial that the internal IT teams have the appropriate skills and help in raising the productivity levels.
It will also be key to understand how uniformity within IT hardware and standardisation of infrastructure helps to reduce costs. In current times it is important to provide a well implemented hybrid work and IT environment which makes it easier to manage whole reducing costs and lowering manpower.
Tambi Baik, Country Manager, Saudi Arabia, and Regional Manager Enterprise, GCC Region, NetApp
One of the key approaches that CIOs and IT decision makers need to adopt is to focus on simplifying their IT infrastructure. This can be achieved by consolidating hardware and software, reducing the number of systems and applications in use, and standardising processes and workflows. By simplifying their IT infrastructure, organisations can reduce the complexity of their IT operations, which in turn can lead to significant cost savings.
Another important approach is to adopt a more strategic approach to IT procurement. This involves developing a clear understanding of the organisation’s current and future IT needs, as well as the various options available for meeting those needs. By taking a strategic approach to IT procurement, organisations can identify the most cost-effective solutions that meet their specific requirements, rather than simply selecting the lowest-cost option.
CIOs and IT decision makers also need to focus on optimising their IT operations. This can be achieved by leveraging automation and artificial intelligence, AI technologies to streamline IT processes and workflows. By automating repetitive and manual tasks, organisations can reduce the time and resources required to manage their IT operations, which can lead to significant cost savings.
Finally, CIOs and IT decision makers need to adopt a continuous improvement mindset. This involves regularly assessing and optimising their IT operations, processes, and workflows to ensure that they are operating at peak efficiency. By adopting these approaches, CIOs and IT decision makers can reduce costs, increase efficiency, and deliver better business outcomes for their organisations.
Ahmad Saad, Country Manager, UAE, and Qatar, Liferay
Continuous investments into technology will be a longer lasting line of defence since it will be the sustainable differentiator that sets companies apart.
A focus on improving performance and reducing total cost of ownership of digital solutions on the cloud. The latest recessions and crises have demonstrated that technology should never be the first casualty in case of an economic downturn. Rather, this should be an area of a company’s budget to nurture and invest in, especially in troubled times.
By accelerating time-to-market and reducing costs with a robust platform, businesses will be equipped to survive through future downturns and thrive despite the circumstances. Liferay for instance provides organisations with a single platform to reach all key users without the need to invest in multiple software platforms for different stakeholders such as customers, employees, partners, and suppliers. This is achieved through a single easy-to-use toolbox with solutions such as DXP-as-a-Service and Liferay Experience Cloud.
Businesses must build and connect multiple solutions, like customer portals, intranets, websites etc. via native content, analytics, and commerce capabilities to reduce costs by automating processes, communication, transactions, and interactions online to reach users with tools that help organisations become more efficient and focus on strategic business objectives.
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