IT budgets have declined due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting global recession while cloud and infrastructure costs have grown. But content delivery, data distribution, and business support make data centers critical for enterprises to thrive. This leaves system administrators seeking opportunities to cut costs by consolidating server racks and operating with higher efficiency. Increasing your IT agility doesn’t have to break your budget. To help you prevent making security sacrifices and greater spending, we have a few tips to explain how to stretch your budget further and do more with less.
Tip 1: Understand Your Equipment’s Life Cycle
Many enterprises cling to their old ways as they slowly attempt to transition to newer strategies; for instance, refreshing hardware every three to five years like clockwork. Routers, core switches, wireless access points, servers, and security equipment—all completely functional—are traded or discarded in this routine upgrade. We aren’t suggesting that upgrades aren’t an essential piece of the puzzle, but upgrades should and can be significantly more flexible in their frequency. Remove the manufacturer mandate dependency and choose a deliberate upgrade structure for your IT environment with a trusted third-party maintenance (TPM) vendor. This will grant you cost savings and increased IT agility on equipment that is no longer dependent on regular upgrades to receive regular software updates. On average, this upgrade concept can apply to roughly 40 to 60% of your current equipment.
Tip 2: Adopt a Hybrid Approach to Maintenance
Hyperconvergence and the cloud are synonymous with IT infrastructure innovation. As environments grow and transform, hybrid models become a more popular stepping stone to the cloud. Until recently, IT environments have been treated as one uniform piece, built to transform and be replaced simultaneously. Today, we need to approach our IT environments with a different lens that can separate the whole into several parts, each part having different priorities. Based on budgets, we can then determine which new product innovations are needed to benefit the business and which existing products can remain in place. The lifespan of the build is increased, and costs decreased when this happens. With this approach, greater efficiency, hybridization, and innovation can be achieved.
Tip 3: Integrate Pre-Owned Equipment
We know the thought of pre-owned or “used” equipment makes IT professionals wary, but at Curvature, we know a thing or two about finding the perfect way to expand networks with current and second-generation equipment. With pre-owned equipment, you can maximize the lifespan of your servers, storage, and network hardware, to do more with less. At Curvature, “pre-owned” means the equipment has been thoroughly tested to meet the highest standards, so you can achieve better value in the procurement of your IT network infrastructure. “Pre-owned” can also mean fully configured devices. Curvature’s products can come fully configured prior to deployment. Plus, with Curvature’s stringent testing requirements and warranty policy, you don’t have to worry that you won’t get the same quality as newer models.
As data center hardware reaches the end of its warranty, don’t feel trapped to replace your systems. Capitalize on independent support for your IT maintenance needs. Curvature offers vendor neutrality, state-of-the-art equipment testing, and the ability to maintain systems beyond the end-of-service mandates from Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM). Empower your IT budget with 75% savings on hardware, 20% more availability within your budget, and 24/7 global support.
