Managed Services Provider Doing More for Less

In lean and mean times, small and midsize businesses often cut capital expenditures and discretionary operating expenses. Many companies defer hiring and limit their investments to those with short payback periods and a high return on investment. That is not surprising. These are natural reactions to economic uncertainty.

Information technology is certainly not immune to budget cuts in a slow economy. In most small and midsize companies, IT represents a big chunk of the operating budget-and a big opportunity for cost cutting. In fact, the question is no longer, whether IT expenses can be trimmed. In a recessionary environment, the real questions are how much of a company's IT budget is fat, how much is muscle, and how can you tell them apart?

For most companies, these questions have never been more important. The fact is that today, IT plays a key role in the success or failure of a business. An organization's IT infrastructure has become an essential component for doing business in a connected world where customer expectations and competitive threats are growing continually. Somehow some of the business companies used IT managed services provider just to deal with all the needs of the company that they are needed in order to maintain the state of the firm that they have.

Companies must therefore be careful not to make the wrong cuts in the wrong areas. For instance, if your network were to go down, how long would your business survive? How long could you afford to be without e-mail access? How would your business be affected if you couldn't send out orders or proposals for a few days? And what would be the impact of losing all your business data for the past five years?

Fortunately, there is plenty of room for cutting IT costs without risking your business or your ability to serve customers. The secret lies in knowing where the fat resides-and in knowing how to trim that excess without affecting the meat and bone needed to maintain healthy business operations and develop a competitive advantage.