It’s not what many of us want to think about, but following the period of lockdown there will be inevitably some clients who won’t make it. This will mean reduced income for your firm and after people and buildings IT tends to be the single largest cost. So how do you reduce your cost still provide the core services your firm needs whilst adjusting to the new normal?
In a series of articles that we address how you go about saving some money and protecting your core business IT functions.
Support Contracts
Let’s start here the majority of firms will have a support contract with a local supplier of IT equipment this will usually be a monthly retainer and include support for users and servers. Assuming that the equipment and systems you have are reliable this insurance type support could be an expensive option. Depending on your contractual terms you should consider moving to a break and fix contract where you pay nothing, unless you ask your IT provider to do something. Moreover if you find you have staff with less to do you could consider redeploying them to take care of the more mundane support tasks and then only getting expert support when you need it, on a time and materials basis. There are key systems that you will want to make sure that are properly taken care of around things like, backup, anti-virus, and software updates, but a lot of the other non-essential upgrades can be delayed.
Quick Recommendations
1. Review your Support Contracts
2. Give notice quickly if you need to
3. Can you convert your contract it to a time and materials basis from a monthly?
4. Can you reploy some of your staff to produce low level IT Support?
5. Delay non essentials upgrades
6. Keep core systems running
This is a difficult area to navigate without risk so if you need some help please let us know we are happy to review you support arrangements to let you know how you can reduce your costs free of charge during this difficult period.
Email David.Watson@anshin.co.uk