Posts

Best Practice – The Lowest Price May Not Save You Money

/in

Small businesses face many challenges as they start up, grow, and thrive. Technology and IT services are one such challenge. While small businesses can find the technology and IT services they need, and want, IT costs often poses a barrier to entry. The range of competing solutions, evolving security requirements, the need for cyber insurance, and the lack of specialized advice combine to create additional complexity and stress.

Faced with budget constraints, and uncertain of the choices before them, small businesses often focus on price. More specifically, they look for the lowest-priced technology and services that they believe will meet their needs. Unfortunately, price-first decisions can lead to significantly greater costs over time.

What to Avoid

Free Services
  • Vendors market free services to consumers. These services usually lack features, security, and support necessary for effective business use. Using these features often violates industry or legal standards for protecting information. The result: you face increased risk and liabilities.
Consumer Tech
  • Manufacturers often price laptops and other consumer devices lower than their business model counterparts. And while feature differences may be minimal, business models typically offer longer warranties (1 year versus 30 to 90 days) and include certified repairs and warranty services. Often, these services include, or can be upgraded to include, on-site service on the next business day.
  • The impact is longer repair and service times, resulting in more business disruptions and downtime.
Good Enough
  • Many businesses choose less expensive solutions because they are “good enough.” These solutions may provide anywhere from 60% to 80% of what you need or want.
  • Although this may work in the beginning, businesses will often end up adding another low-cost solution when they need the additional features.
  • You end up with multiple tools with overlapping features and silos of data and information. The result is reduced efficiency and productivity.
Skimping on Security
  • Small businesses feel like a small target for cyber attacks. In reality, small businesses are easier targets because they are generally more vulnerable.
  • And while your business may not be a specific target, you are more likely to get caught by broad-based attacks, such as ransomware.
  • We have blogged quite a bit on the increasing security demands. Stepping back from security reduces costs, but will result in business disruption, financial and legal liability, and higher recovery costs.
  • Most small businesses fail within six months of a successful cyberattack.

Focus on Value

When making technology and IT service decisions, focus on value, not cost. Value includes consideration of factors such as efficiency, enablement, overhead, flexibility, and expandability.

Here are some other value considerations:

  • Understand the Demands on your Business. Regulatory requirements and industry standards will impose features and limitations on the technologies and services you choose. 
  • Evaluate Current and Future Needs. Avoid lower-cost solutions that will need future upgrades or replacements. These changes can cost more than the initial savings and can disrupt, or require, significant changes to workflows and business operations.
  • Consider Scalability. Many cloud services offer subscription options you can upgrade as your requirements evolve. While you should not avoid necessary security features, you can scale other capabilities to your current needs.
  • Focus on Best Fit. Assess how well the technologies and services you are considering will fit together. You lose the savings on lower-cost services if you need to manually move data or add third-party data sync tools.

Call to Action:

If you have not done so recently, now is a great time to step back and assess your IT services and solutions. Our Cloud Advisors are ready to help and assist with any questions or concerns. Contact us or schedule time with one of our Cloud Advisors. 

About the Author

Bill is a Senior Cloud Advisor responsible for helping small and midsize organizations with cloud forward solutions that meet their business needs, priorities, and budgets. Bill works with executives, leaders, and team members to understand workflows, identify strategic goals and tactical requirements, and design solutions and implementation phases. Having helped over 200 organizations successfully adopt cloud solutions, his expertise and working style ensure a comfortable experience effective change management. hBill Seybolt bio picture

 

7 Steps to Build Your 2024 IT Strategic Plan

/in

2024 IT Action PlanIn our 3T@3 Series event in December, we discussed creating your 2024 IT Action Plan. During the session, we walked through a proven process for building a feasible plan for the coming year.

Here is a breakdown of 7 key steps in the process

1 Define Your Business Drivers

Your first step is to assess your business drivers.  What are the conditions, internally and externally, that you expect to impact your business over the coming year?

External drivers are generally beyond your control or influence: changes in the economy, evolving customer needs and priorities, shifts in business conditions in your target markets, and changes to the competitive landscape.

Internal drivers are within your control. What are your goals and objectives? Which are priorities, needs, or wants?  Do you have defined business plans and targets for investment?

Many of your internal drivers may be responding to external drivers.  Identifying these drivers, and their priority, will guide business and technology solutions over the coming year.

2 Review Your IT Lifecycle

Review your hardware and software inventory, and where each item sits in its lifecycle. Document applications or systems due upgrades; catalog servers, infrastructure, and user devices due for replacement.  Use this assessment to schedule necessary expenditures.

Also, consider if now is the time to upgrade or replace older systems with managed cloud-based solutions or services. Doing so can reduce capital expenditures and may provide more scalable resources and services.

3 Define IT Initiatives

Having planned for scheduled hardware and software refreshes, use your priorities list of business drivers to create a finite set of IT initiatives.

Your business drivers should trigger business decisions, actions, and plans. Analyze these plans for how IT services can enable or support the desired actions and outcomes. This strategy and analysis becomes your IT requirements for the coming year.  The priority of your business goals and objectives will set the priority for your IT initiatives.

Your IT initiatives are defined, manageable projects that meet your IT requirements.

4 Benchmark Your Security CPR™

Security CPR™ is our model for pragmatic protection for your business.

  • Communicate & Educate
  • Protect & Prevent
  • Respond & Recover

Your IT initiatives will, without a doubt, interact with your security services.  Take a step back and review your security protocols and systems.

  • Verify that you remain in compliance with legal and industry regulations
  • Validate that your IT initiatives will do no harm, or will enhance your security profile
  • Adjust your security services to changing risks, priorities, and threats

5 Set Clear Priorities

Your budget has limits.  With security considerations in place, prioritize your IT spending. We recommend prioritizing within three distinct categories:

  • Lifecycle Events – Replace and upgrade aging hardware and software
  • Operating Expenses – Ongoing costs for cloud, services, and resources
  • Investments – Your IT initiatives

6 Build Your Budget

Allocate your target budget to each of the categories.  Fund items in each group from highest priority on down.

One key to building the budget is to facilitate some give and take.  Moving budget between categories can be done, carefully, in ways that benefit each aspect of your IT spending.

For example, moving to Remote Desktops in a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) cloud can extend the life of desktops and laptops by 2 to 3 years. Delaying system upgrades can be a safe move if your initiatives are working towards replacement.

7 Create Your Schedule

While it is natural to want to get everything done right away and all at once, thoughtful scheduling increases your likelihood of success for your 2024 IT Action Plan.

Scheduling starts with actions: the what, when, how, and how of your IT initiatives. Smart scheduling will also include consideration of dependencies and resource availability.

Going one step further, review your business cycle limitations. Avoid scheduling projects, particularly critical paths, that conflict with more intense periods within your business cycle. You may have a busy season, or need to be careful not to impact your quarterly close and reporting. Whatever demands your business cycle creates, adjust your planning and schedule around them.

How Cumulus Global Can Help You

We focus on helping clients get the most value from their current IT services and new, cloud forward solutions.  As you build your 2024 IT Action Plan, we can help. With a history of strategic IT consulting services, we can help you build your plan, review plans you have drafted, or simply discuss options.

Click here to schedule a call with a Cloud Advisor or send us an email. There is no cost and no obligation.

About the Author

Bill Seybolt bio pictureBill is a Senior Cloud Advisor responsible for helping small and midsize organizations with cloud forward solutions that meet their business needs, priorities, and budgets. Bill works with executives, leaders, and team members to understand workflows, identify strategic goals and tactical requirements, and design solutions and implementation phases. Having helped over 200 organizations successfully adopt cloud solutions, his expertise and working style ensure a comfortable experience effective change management. 

 

4 Steps to Recalibrate Your IT Strategy

/in

With our four steps to recalibrating your IT strategy, you’ll be able to assess appropriate changes and make informed decisions about future business and IT services.

Back in September 2020, in the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic, Garter published a leadership article on IT Strategy entitle, “Decide Now How Much to Recalibrate IT Strategic Plans.” The article, within the context of the pandemic, discusses how IT leaders might decide the scope of changes to strategic plans.  While intended for enterprise and upper mid-market CIOS, the article brings forward some valid points for the small and midsize businesses we serve.

Recalibrating Your IT Strategy in Four Easy Steps

1. Understand Changes to Your Business

In the midst of change, particularly when the triggers are beyond our control, assessing the scope and impact is difficult.  By stepping back with this first strategy to recalibrate your IT plans, we can assess the current, and expected, changes both impacting our businesses and within.

  • Is your business still in response? Or have you moved into recovery and renewal?
  • How have new work models — in-office, at home/remote, and hybrid — altered the way your employees work?
  • What do you expect the mix to be going forward?
  • To what extent have your business’ strategy or tactics changed?
  • Are these near-term, longer-term, or transitional in nature?
  • Do you have IT strategic services in place?

2. Map Business Changes to IT Plans and Services

With an understanding of the impact and on-going changes to the business, you can assess your IT strategy and tactics.

  • How have changes affected the business model, markets, or operations of the business?
  • What changes to  business goals, objectives, or strategies need to be reflected in your IT services, strategy, or tactics?
  • Did you add any new or temporary capabilities/services that you no longer need — or that should be made permanent?
  • How might changes be impacting your costs, risks, or value proposition of your IT services and systems?

3. Rate Changes and Impacts from Your IT Strategy

With the above in mind, rate the impact of business change on your IT plans and services. From here it will be much easier to strategize and plan your next IT moves with data in mind.

  • Critical
    • Business direction and/or operations warrant a new IT strategy and a re-alignment of most IT services.
  • Major
    • Your IT strategy needs adjustments with significant changes to IT services and priorities.
  • Minor
    • Your IT strategy and services remain valid, but the priorities and timing of your plans need to adapt.
  • None
    • Your existing strategy and services continue to meet your IT and business needs.

4. Adjust Your Strategic IT Plans Accordingly

Understanding the scope and impact of changes to your IT strategy, plans, and services, you can recalibrate and move forward in a structured, efficient manner.

  • Reprioritize
    • Determine which initiatives to start, stop, pause, or reset.
    • Identify IT services that should be removed or normalized.
  • Communicate
    • Share changes, priorities, and reasons with your team to build ground-level support.
  • Reset Metrics
    • Determine how you want to measure change and results — cost savings, productivity, etc.

Whether your business and IT services going forward need minor adjustments or major rework, Cumulus Global can assist in your planning and execution. Contact us for a complimentary session with one of our Cloud Advisors.

Webcasts

Nothing Found

Sorry, no posts matched your criteria