IT teams around the world are being asked to reduce spending due to the macro-economic environment, but meanwhile inflation is already stretching budgets. So, how do you cut spending when expenses are rising sharply?

Cutting spending across the enterprise might bring an organization within budget, but it also can negatively affect employees’ digital experience and productivity. IT teams need a way to streamline spending by optimizing cloud and network traffic and eliminating IT waste like bloated software spend and unnecessary hardware replacements. Here are a few examples of where IT leaders are finding savings.

4 Ways to Reduce Spending Without Sacrificing the Digital Experience

1 – Smart Device Refresh. Enterprises typically refresh employee devices every few years based on the assumption that new devices will perform better. But the truth is, not all devices need to be replaced when the arbitrary the refresh cycle comes around. Rather than letting a device’s age determine when it needs to refresh, organizations should base that decision on the user experience and device performance, deploying monitoring tools to check on a device’s health and how well it is performing for users. 

A digital experience management solution can give IT managers visibility into device performance and the user experience. It can help determine if an IT asset actually needs to be replaced, or whether it merely needs an upgrade. It also can identify if a device is working just fine, meeting all of the users’ needs, and should be left alone.

2 – Eliminate Spending on Unnecessary Software Licenses.  

Companies without clear insights into their digital experience often throw money away on software that subsequently sits idle. Flexera’s 2023 State of ITAM Report shows that 38% of desktop software spending and 33% of software as a service (SaaS) spending goes to waste because of under-used licenses. In terms of dollars, the average company spends more than $130,000 a year on unused, underutilized or duplicated SaaS licenses. 

Companies can find savings just by making sure that the software licenses they buy are properly put to use. Practical steps toward this goal include:

• Renew licenses only for actively used applications—including desktop software, SaaS by analyzing key usage metrics.
• Automatically discover and track all enterprise applications and versions that are in use, whether locally or in the cloud.
• Gain insight into shadow IT apps in order to manage software license spend and reduce risk.
• Compare key usage metrics, such as the number of times used, total usage duration and last time used, for all types of enterprise applications.
• Reclaim unused and underused licenses to lower overall costs.

3 – Reduce Bandwidth Requirements

It can be extremely difficult to identify and eliminate potential bottlenecks that cause network congestion and drive up bandwidth. Organizations can use network flow monitoring to enable efficient capacity planning, which can dramatically reduce bandwidth requirements. It can also provide a comprehensive picture of communications patterns, including cloud traffic, across the network, enabling an enterprise to proactively identify trouble spots and prioritize traffic according to its importance.

4 – Optimize Cloud Spend

As IaaS has become ubiquitous, many enterprises are seeing cloud costs spiral out of control. This is primarily due to a lack of insight where exactly cloud traffic is going and how that is impacting spend. Cloud monitoring solutions can provide context into your cloud bill so you can strategically reduce costs without impacting performance. For example, simply identifying unnecessary round trip traffic to the cloud can significantly reduce your cloud egress costs while maintaining all the benefits IaaS provides. 

Cutting Spending Without Hurting Performance

IT budgets are under siege, battered by inflation, supply chain troubles, rising device costs and increasing cloud spend. Meanwhile, increasingly complex infrastructure has made it challenging to monitor IT asset performance and usage, which has led to bloated spending on software, network and cloud assets.

The savings realized by carefully reducing spending on underused software licenses, more effectively managing device refresh and streamlining network flow can quickly add up. In one example, a smart refresh approach resulted in a $350,000 savings to a company. In another, a global bank realized $10 million in annual cost avoidance by identifying that 45% of the devices in their enterprise did not need to be replaced.

With effective monitoring and focusing on unnecessary device spending, enterprises can manage to cut costs without hurting performance.