s the year draws to a close, November presents an opportune time to review your year in IT. What new equipment was brought online? Did your staff receive any new training to maximize the benefits? What goals were accomplished and what tasks still remain to optimize your environment? The answers to these questions provide an effective gauge on the health of your IT department and a perfect indicator of what can be improved should you have any unspent IT budget. Here are six ways to utilize your end-of-year budget and tick all the boxes.
1) START THE QUOTING PROCESS ASAP
Scrambling to get pricing as Christmas gets closer is a gamble with people out on PTO- even if you don’t know if the project is likely to happen. Alternatively, if some IT budget opens up and you already have a quote, you are set. Pick 2 or 3 items that may go through and get the quotes ASAP.
2) LEVERAGE A PARTNER TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF YEAR-END DISCOUNTS
Some providers such as Dell EMC don’t actually end their fiscal year in December. This means Dell reps have not filled their quotas. A platinum partner such as Logical Front can leverage their year end with partner reps in December to get favorable pricing. By taking advantage of this special relationship, you can make the upgrades listed next.
3) LOOK INTO INCREMENTAL PERFORMANCE AND STORAGE UPGRADES
Memory upgrades for servers and storage disks that may be important, but not urgent are a great house cleaning type of end-of-year purchase. While they won’t revolutionize your performance, they will help keep your systems running smoothly. Solutions such as Dell EMC’s all-flash arrays improve system efficiency.
4) SUPPORT CONTRACTS
While it won’t affect the current year, support contracts are a great way to build a solid platform for future projects. Logical Front is able to negotiate year-long contracts of variable size to assist customers with their datacenter and other IT issues. Support contracts are great if a customer knows that they will need some expert help in the coming year. With proven IT experience, setting up a contract for the coming year is a great spend.
5) EDUCATION
Dell EMC offers an all-inclusive education bundle that can be added to any purchase (or purchased separately). It offers training courses on everything in the Dell EMC portfolio. Consequently, it provides great value for customers looking to reduce training costs on emerging technologies. This is an especially good idea when purchasing new equipment to ensure a smooth start to the new year.
6) BOLSTER SECURITY
Generally, costs for replacing aging AV products that customers aren’t happy with is a lower cost item than big hardware purchases. Because of this, getting the jump on next year by knocking out cyber security in 2017 is a great way to free up budget in 2018 for other purchases. Vendors such as Bitdefender provide solution packages to protect you against every threat.
