Cost Containment

Given today’s challenging economy, organizations of all kinds face intense financial pressure from such factors as slowing sales, squeezed profits and hard-to-raise capital. In response, many are setting strategies to limit their operational costs. Cost containment, done right, is a powerful way to outpace the competition, reward investors and help an organization achieve its most important financial goals.

Yet the task is even more complicated. At the same time, CIOs are also being asked to improve alignment among business innovations and IT processes, deal with rising hardware and software maintenance costs, pay higher employee expenses, and connect with, manage and secure a new wave of mobile computing and communications devices.

IT key for cutting costs

In addition, nontechnical managers are increasingly being given oversight of the IT budget. Many CIOs report to Finance, and IT investments may require the CFO’s sign-off. This creates added pressure on CIOs to provide justifiable return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) numbers for proposed initiatives.

One path to cost containment is via IT, since a range of technologies can now help, including:

• Cloud Computing: Selectively stores customer-sensitive data “in the cloud” using private, public and hybrid solutions. Also offers test, deploy and run applications with help from third parties, which can lower staff, facilities and equipment costs.
• Virtualization and Data-Center Consolidation: Lets multiple systems and applications run on a single virtual server, thereby helping IT departments reduce their hardware requirements and operate with fewer, smaller data centers — which also use less energy.
• As a Service: Lets the IT group offer computing and business processes as on-demand services. Applications, computer platforms, the IT infrastructure and even business processes can now be offered as services that internal users pay on an as-needed basis.

Are you an IT leader looking to contain your costs? CSC can help. Contact us.