The pandemic challenging IT organizations

Remember 2019? When the economy was growing, many businesses were running smoothly & the sky was the limit? Global IT spending growth was at almost 3.9%. Plans and budgets for 2020 were made and the outlook was positive. Until the pandemic arrived and changed the world. A smooth running IT environment is now more important than ever. And this situation calls for out-of-the-box solutions.

A smoothly running IT environment is ever more important. Remote working, online services & collaboration require a solid IT infrastructure. Do more with less is the challenge IT managers are currently facing.

Here are our tips:

1. Replace only what needs to be replaced

The 80-20 rule applies. 80% of your IT equipment lasts longer than manufacturers tell you it lasts. This goes for your switches, servers, routers and storage equipment. This will not only save money but also reduces risk involved with replacing critical IT equipment.

2. Understand what is really failing in your infrastructure

If it’s working don’t change it. The thing is that often there’s not enough insight into what exactly the bottlenecks are. We advise you to reach out to your current maintenance provider and ask for a copy of the tickets that have been serviced over the past year. Spend some time with your network team to identify where the real failures are in your IT environment. Our guess, it’s not in your network equipment.

As explained above, most networking equipment has a much longer life cycle than manufacturers want us to believe. Cisco states in their technical documentation that the meantime between failure is upwards of 20 years in most switches, however will only typically support them for between 5-7 years.

3. Don’t let end of life be your replacement milestone

Think about it. How often do you allow the salesperson who’s asking you to replace be the very same person who prospers from the replacement? Each and every time we walk into a phone shop when our contract is up, we know exactly what comes next. Do you always replace? We often see that some of the logic that people use in their personal spending is not always applied to the business. Just as in point number two, sit down with your team and really look to see if the end of life units are causing any issues, rather than replacing them for the sake of it.

4. Understand where the real risks are and divide the network up accordingly

Not all assets perform the same task in the network. We now know that a lot of the devices sitting in your corporate network have far less important compared to those in the data centre or remote sites. Be sure to segment different parts of your network to understand what needs to be fully maintained and what could be open to other options.

If you wish to seek advice on assessing some of these options further in order to reduce your business costs, please reach out to us.

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At Aliter Networks we believe in reusing IT networks. We are dedicated to making a difference with IT. For People, Planet and Profit. We sell, we buy and service refurbished networking equipment. It is our mission to have 500.000 IT products reused by 2025.