10 Ways to Cut IT Costs - Consolidation and Conclusion
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10. Environment consolidation and virtualization
Environment consolidation is yet another opportunity to reduce technology expenses. Managing release schedules in a manner that would take advantage of environment ‘down time’ can result in a consolidation of environments that are used more productively. Note that this consolidation does not propose the mixing of development and testing environments; those still need to be separate.
Virtualization is also an excellent mechanism for consolidating hardware expense, yet still allows the organization the ability to use several environments. A possible cost challenge on this front, though, is that the virtualization software can be costly. A cost-benefit analysis will need to be conducted to ensure that the software expense associated with virtualization offsets the current environment’s hardware expense.
Conclusion
We are in a business environment whereby the bottom line needs to change; not necessarily the effectiveness of the existing spend. The most ideal end to our current challenges would be an application of both cost reduction and increased efficiency. But as mentioned earlier, there is a need to reduce cost in the short term. These techniques can help organizations achieve that end and provide businesses’ with more alternatives from their global IT services provider outside of the obvious offshoring solution.
David Kapfhammer is a Global Director with Keane, Inc.
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