Planning Your IT Budget for 2017? Don’t Overlook These 6 Factors
It’s a fresh beginning of another year!!!
Yeah, 2017 is here. Are you ready with your new year resolutions? I am sure every one of you has set more than one. However, entrepreneurs have one target with them to achieve that repeats every year. It’s about to maximize the profit.
Organizations are experiencing avant-garde transformation by adopting innovative technologies. They are enjoying agility in obtaining their business goals, as advanced technologies streamline and automate their operational, administrative and marketing processes. But, what about investment? While aspiring for higher revenue, one cannot ignore the bottom line.
We write down this post for all those entrepreneurs who are willing to embrace advanced technologies but have budget constraints. Let’s see how to strategize your IT spend and which technologies are best to invest in this year.
1. Seek for Powerful Presence on Mobile
There are businesses’ who are satisfied with having a website, that is not even mobile friendly. Might be they are getting good business, but sorry to say they are losing their valuable customers and competitiveness in the market by avoiding to boost mobile platform.
Nowadays, organizations have to deal with tech-savvy clients who use their smartphones for searching any stuff, accomplishing their routine tasks and even making a purchase decision. A mobile app or website enable them to explore your products and services and take a buying decision instantly.
Introducing BYOD concept, smartphone helps organizations to empower employee’s productivity by allowing them to perform their job anytime anywhere. So, develop a mobile app not to cut down your IT budget, but to reach out larger target audience and generate huge revenue.
2. Migrate to The Cloud
Eliminate the cost to set up a personal server for hosting of your website, application or software. Well, server installation requires IT infrastructure and proper maintenance to work smoothly. That again increase your IT spend. Cloud enables organizations to host their website or other solutions in a shared environment. It directly saves a big amount from your budget.
Go for private or public or hybrid cloud where you need not establish and maintain a separate IT infrastructure. Entrepreneurs can create a virtual office to run the business and connect with the company from anywhere, at any time. On the other side, the technology has its own risks for compliances, security, and privacy.
Gradually, organizations have started using web-enabled devices to have easy access to the data. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are breakthrough cloud computing platforms for your infrastructure needs. These platforms take care of your data security and allow you to focus on what you do best.
Eventually, cloud computing helps you in achieving reduced overall IT costing, business continuity, access to automatic updates, scalability, flexibility of work practices, collaboration efficiency, and much more.
Related post: 9 Benefits of Migrating Your Business to the Cloud
3. Integrate Ready to Use 3rd Party APIs
No need to develop a separate software or solution for your every need. There are several APIs available in the market for free. They maybe not perfect as per your requirements but they are very near to what you are looking for. Try to utilize as many free APIs as you can. It cuts off your costing to develop new tools or solutions. Moreover, it decreases the dependency and allows to move ahead in order to achieve the target faster.
4. Outsource to Highly Experienced IT Company
You will find a list of IT outsourcing services providers with a single search. You can have several options to choose from. However, identification of the best one is really a tough job, as everyone offers exclusive commitments. Analyze work portfolio of IT outsourcing providers; you can have a brief idea about the excellence and expertise of the company.
Ask all your queries before the project confirmation. If you get the adequate understanding and answers of your questions and confusions, then tie up with that IT service providers. Outsourcing to experts aids you in developing the solution quickly with advanced features and functionalities.
5. Move to Virtualization
One of the most emerging technologies these days. Virtualizations facilitates organizations to run their multiple operating applications and systems from a single computer. It combines hardware to attain immense productivity from fewer servers. Adoption of virtualization enables enterprises to reduce the IT costing by 50% as well as simplify and speed up IT maintenance and management.
Virtualization helps in boosting IT agility and efficiency by reducing the overall IT expenditure. It seems quite complicated to adopt the technology in the current time, as it is in emerging phase. But, you can definitely consider it as an option for your future IT needs.
6. Digital Marketing
Marketing and advertising require hard efforts to promote the business and derive customers. Thus, it becomes a headache for the entrepreneurs to manage both operations and marketing. Here, you can simply select digital marketing experts who work for you. Promote your business through various online marketing channels such as social media, forums, e-mailers, and much more.
Maybe you feel outsourcing to expert again add some amount to your budget. But, it is highly recommended to take help of digital marketing experts to have channelized marketing efforts and reach out to a wide consumer base. It will end up by delivering lots of branding benefits in the future.
There are many other hi-tech technologies that help organizations in boosting their business efficiency, but those technologies are quite tough to adopt in the present scenario. Because either they are in emerging stage or required a large investment or not available for small to mid-scale organizations.
Being one of the early adopters of web and mobile technologies, Intuz experts continuously study the latest and upcoming technology trends to facilitate the readers with thorough guidelines about how to utilize technologies in real-time to automate and optimize business processes.
Have A Wealthier New Year Ahead!!
Originally published at Intuz Blog on January 10, 2017.
