Three ways to reduce expenses without sacrificing an employee's digital experience

The cost of supporting employee devices continues to increase, as does spending on network bandwidth and cloud services. Unfortunately, for many organizations, IT budgets are not keeping pace with the rising costs.

While IT spending is expected to rise in the next year, a large portion of that increase will go toward increased labor costs, as inflation and a stubbornly tight tech labor market will force companies to increase salaries.

IT always faces budgetary pressures, but with the increase of hybrid and remote work, increasingly complex IT infrastructures, the uncertain global economic outlook, supply chain disruptions, and rising costs, those pressures are more powerful than ever.

Research firm Gartner predicts IT spending will increase 2.4 percent in 2023, in part driven by employee device costs, which have risen 20 percent since the beginning of 2021, and public cloud spending, which is forecasted to increase 21 percent in 2023.

It can be extremely difficult to identify where IT can cut costs without impacting end-user productivity and satisfaction. The increasing prevalence of software as a service (SaaS) and hybrid cloud infrastructure makes it challenging to monitor IT asset performance and usage, leading to bloated software, network and cloud spending.

Three Ways to Control IT Costs

IT leaders need not despair, however. There are steps they can take to improve efficiencies within their organizations’ infrastructure. Here are three ways organizations can cut expenses without sacrificing their employees’ digital experience:

Smart device refresh. Instead of relying on age as the sole indicator of when it's time to refresh a device, companies should use digital experience monitoring. By doing this, they only have to replace devices when they are no longer performing well for users.

Organizations can deploy tools to correlate actual user experience to device health and performance, which can determine whether devices need replacement, an upgrade or no action at all. This can dramatically reduce the number of devices requiring replacement by analyzing employee experience.

Organizations can also compare refresh and replacement options to determine the optimal refresh strategy and reduce capital expense. By knowing and using the actual health of employee devices to determine refresh schedules, instead of choosing an artificial date, organizations can be sure that all the devices are helping their employees perform at peak productivity.

Improve network performance. Organizations need to track down bottlenecks in their networks that can degrade performance and lead to high levels of resource utilization.

NPM and DEM tools can provide IT and network teams with the insight they need into device performance, actual user experience and network traffic so that they can reduce costs. With these tools, IT leaders can significantly reduce cloud egress and network transport costs across the enterprise by streamlining transport, diminishing latency and optimizing performance.

Enterprises are dealing with overwhelming volumes of data, and being able to manage it across their networks will be a key to providing great digital experiences. The move toward digital transformation over the past few years has put enormous stress on legacy IT infrastructure systems, including networks, and IT leaders need to proactively identify trouble spots before they become a major problem. IT leaders need to gain a better picture of the communications flowing across the network. The right use of tools can help reduce network and cloud costs across the digital enterprise by streamlining data transport, diminishing network latency, and reducing the data sent to and from cloud services.

Identify and eliminate spending on under-used or unnecessary licenses. License tracking measures often fall by the wayside as many organizations lack the tools to adequately monitor their infrastructure’s performance. With the dramatic shift to SaaS over the past several years, many organizations are wasting thousands of dollars a year on unused, underutilized or duplicate licenses.

A Flexera report shows that 38 percent of desktop software spending and 33 percent of SaaS spending are wasted due to under-used licenses. While SaaS usually reduces IT support costs overall, the lack of visibility and monitoring often results in unused licenses and unnecessary expenses.

Companies can see significant savings simply by doing a better job of making sure that all their software licenses are being properly used. They can deploy DEM tools that can accurately identify applications that are being used and help IT teams reduce extraneous application costs.

These tools leverage insight into actual application usage to identify actively used applications across desktop software, SaaS and even shadow IT applications to reclaim unused and underused licenses to lower overall application costs.

Making the best use of tools to control costs

Modern IT infrastructures are becoming more complex, a trend that will accelerate long before it begins to abate. Faced with rising device costs, spiraling cloud consumption, and the murky economic outlook, IT leaders are being asked to trim their sails. For some leaders, that pressure might push them to make unwise decisions that will impact their employees' digital experience, cutting productivity and sapping morale.

Fortunately, IT leaders can find tools that will snip costs without cutting into productivity. These tools can help manage device refresh cycles, endlessly proliferating software licenses and network performance. These solutions can provide end-to-end, cost-saving insights within an entire IT infrastructure.

Photo Credit: Andy Dean Photography/Shutterstock

Jackson Connell is the senior manager, product and solutions at Riverbed, where he is responsible for Riverbed’s cross-product solutions. Prior to joining Riverbed, Jackson held roles at multiple cybersecurity startups including Threat Stack and iboss, where he was responsible for public relations, analyst relations, internal communications, and content marketing. Jackson also spent several years at LPP, a PR firm specializing in technology and healthtech, where he managed communications programs for clients across a range of industries, including cybersecurity, telecommunications, healthcare and network infrastructure. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Northeastern University.