When budgets get tight and the economic outlook is bleak, business owners and executives tend to turn to information technology as a potential area for cost cutting. The reason for this is that many businesses view IT purely as a cost center, making it a prime target when driving to reduce operating costs.
The current global pandemic has depressed the global economy and businesses are feeling the pressure. A survey by PWC shows that roughly 82% of surveyed CFOs are focused on cost cutting and 67% of them are expecting to defer or cancel planned investments. Facilities and capital expenditures are the top two areas, but 53% of CFOs say IT spending will also be cut (https://www.pwc.com/us/covid-19-survey).
Yet information technology is the foundation for many aspects of business operations, and today’s work-from-home mandates have forced many companies to rethink their IT strategies where remote access and cloud hosting are concerned.
COVID-19 is making businesses reconsider their investments in real estate, office space and on-premises infrastructure, looking instead to the technology that supports remote and mobile workers.
A recent Gartner survey suggests that telecommuting and remote work will become more standard, saying that 74% of CFOs surveyed expect to move previously on-site employees to remote work post-COVID-19 — permanently (https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-04-03-gartner-cfo-surey-reveals-74-percent-of-organizations-to-shift-some-employees-to-remote-work-permanently2).
There have been many studies which show that organizations that took the most advantage of information technology going into a downturn have come out the strongest. Economic downturns actually increase awareness of the role information technology plays in improving business processes and reducing costs, and the global pandemic is highlighting the important role IT plays in supporting communication and enabling work from anywhere.
There have always been questions about the alignment of information technology to the business need, and IT is often perceived as being out of touch with the business. Yet IT is where the business goes for answers when trouble comes, and workers need a way to keep working even when they cannot be in the office.
Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh Cloud Services have the resources businesses need to migrate applications and data from servers and desktops to the cloud.
We help eliminate the capital investments associated with purchasing and maintaining business IT, turning instead to an affordable subscription service that can adjust with changing business needs. Our services create predictability in IT service and cost, providing the remote and mobile access users need while eliminating surprise repair costs and lost productivity due to computer hardware failures.
When you’re looking for IT solutions that work for your business in good times and bad, contact us. We’ll help keep your business and your workers working.
