How to save money on your IT Support costs

1. Have an IT Support contract in place. Rather than calling for assistance in an emergency, having cover in place prior, means better SLA’s (Service Level Agreement), and cruically, proactive support.

2. Speak with an IT provider that can offer unlimited callouts, meaning you can have an engineer onsite as many times as you need, without having to worry about the costs mounting up should you suffer major problems. You will pay a fixed fee that should cover any issue you have, meaning no nasty suprise invoices.

3. Plan on having to replace IT equipment on a schedule, PC’s have a fixed life span when components will start to fail. Having a rolling upgrade scheme means staff are less likely to suffer hardware failure.

4. Downtime can be expensive. The best protection for businesses with regards to stopping major system outages caused by Viruses, Malware etc is to educate their staff. Make sure all staff are aware of cyber threats, what not to do, and what to do should they do something accidently that could jeopardize the network.

5. Consider moving some on-premise servers to cloud based alternatives. You may be using Microsoft Exchange to look after your email services, but that server will need to be replaced eventually. If it fails can your business cope with losing email whilst a new server is ordered, configured, and then brought online? Whilst you might think hosted email is an on-going cost you don’t currently have to pay for, you’ll never need to replace an email server again.