How to prepare your company for economic uncertainty?

Supply problems, the Russo-Ukrainian war, and inflation are only a few recent shocks to the global economy that have likely caused the recession. Organizations throughout the world are getting ready for what is ahead. Leaders are prioritizing investments in new technology to assist them in overcoming obstacles in the future while simultaneously preparing for the likelihood of harder times. Consider these useful cost-cutting tactics for your IT team as the world prepares for economic uncertainty in the upcoming months.

Cutting cost strategically

Cutting costs frequently involves choosing what to discontinue performing, including choosing which initiatives to pause or when to halt hiring. Instead, IT directors should focus on ensuring that current spending is well-controlled and that existing investments yield the highest return on investment. Illuminate technology usage across your firm and ensure that spending is controlled because poorly managed IT spending might unintentionally rise.

IT investment has skyrocketed in many organizations over the past few years, particularly for cloud services and SaaS. According to Gartner, traditional IT investment will switch to public cloud services by 2025 to the tune of 51% in the markets for application software, infrastructure software, business process services, and system infrastructure. The best way to identify spending areas is through a data-driven strategy, concentrating on wasteful spending and considering potential new technological investments.

Reducing unnecessary SaaS spending

The majority of SaaS programs employ "per user" licenses. Monitoring active users and locating staff members who haven't used an application in the past 30, 90, or 365 days might help you drastically cut costs.

Your single sign-on provider can detect instances where sign-ins aren't happening and can help you identify these people in some cases.

Once you've determined the non-users, you can either give the licenses to other staff members or de-allocate any unused licenses to reduce costs. You can more accurately gauge consumption when your contract is up for renewal to ensure you only buy the necessary licenses.

Right-sizing cloud services

After dealing with waste, you can focus on "right-sizing" cloud computing services. It is typical to spin up instances with more capacity than is required; once you can determine their load, just decreasing them down to the appropriate size can greatly lower your cloud price.

Reserve capacity is also essential. You can reduce the price of those resources by about 30–40% by committing to utilizing instance types for a full year and standardizing on instances whenever you can. It is possible to save significantly by eliminating unnecessary and redundant services like load balancers, useless IP addresses, and unconnected storage volumes.

Identifying automation opportunities

Reconsidering how your team members use their time is the next area of focus. If you wanted to free up staff time, are there any manual operations that could be automated? Employee productivity can be increased with automation solutions, which also frees IT staff to focus on more worthwhile and fascinating initiatives. Enhancing IT jobs also increases employee retention, promoting corporate morale and culture and reducing recruitment fees and training expenses for new hires.

Communicating transparently

Engage and communicate openly with every team member as an IT leader. Uncertainty can be decreased by keeping your employees updated on what the company is doing to offset financial issues. This is crucial because when people experience uncertainty, they develop their own stories, which can negatively affect morale. Being open with your teams enhances the likelihood of a larger range of solutions and boosts team members' sense of involvement.

IT teams can further prepare for future economic uncertainty by analyzing areas of spending, deliberately implementing spending cuts, and placing a higher priority on employee experience and organizational transparency after demonstrating resilience over the epidemic. IT teams are facing unique difficulties, but the lessons they learn now will help them in the future.