IT Cost Savings: 6 Strategies That Saved Our Clients £50K+

Whilst we never operate on a one-size-fits-all model, below are some of the steps that we commonly take when identifying cost-saving opportunities  

Full audit of recurring costs 

Conducting a full audit of recurring costs is a crucial first step when looking to identify unnecessary spend. This generally starts by listing all of the monthly, quarterly and annual payments along with their purpose and contract end dates. Then, they are organised based on their renewal dates and the value they bring to the organisation. This will help to identify which costs need immediate attention and which ones can be reviewed later. The final step is to assess its necessity and usage to determine if the product is still needed and whether the plan is the appropriate plan, and if possible, downgrade to a cheaper or even free package.  

An example of how we helped one of our clients is that we downgraded a postcode lookup licence from a paid plan to a free plan since they were not using the product enough to warrant the paid version. We also collaborated with the warehouse team to evaluate the features they were using with their M365 licences and figured out that they could switch from premium to standard without any sacrifice since they never used the premium tier features. We also switched a third-party application from annual to monthly billing since we knew that they would only require this for six months. Whilst the monthly plan was slightly more expensive, it saved the company nearly 50%. 

Renewal Calendar & Strategic Planning 

Suppliers often require long cancellation notice periods, sometimes up to a year, which often finds businesses trapped in auto-renewal contracts. Creating a clear calendar plan allows us to evaluate what needs replacing and when we need to serve notice with the supplier.  

For one client, who required their ticket system and website integration replacing, we were able to use the calendar plan to work out how long this would take and when to serve notice to the current provider, which saved another year's worth of expenses on a system which would soon not be in use.  

Domain Portfolio Audit 

Many organisations build up a large number of domains to avoid typo-squatting (create websites that look legitimate to steal sensitive user data or install malware) and to ensure that they capture those users who have mistyped their domain. Whilst this is understandable for some clients, 95% of their domains remain unused, offering very little value with high annual costs. This can be particularly costly when international domains are used since they generally come with higher renewal fees. Cleaning up the domain portfolio can lead to significant savings.  

Infrastructure Consolidation (CAPEX Investment to Reduce OPEX) 

Sometimes it's necessary to invest in up-front capital to avoid operational expenditure such as ongoing recurring fees.  

One of our clients was running four old physical machines, which were running VMware software to host multiple virtual servers, which were expensive to maintain and were no longer fully supported. We replaced these with two modern servers that have lower running costs, fully supported running Microsoft Azure Local (Azure Stack HCI) on a monthly licence basis. So whilst this was an initial capital investment, it offered a reduced hardware footprint, improved resilience, a supported platform with better performance and paid for itself by year two.  

Cloud Cost Optimisation 

Cloud costs can quietly grow out of control which is often because resources are over‑provisioned, incorrectly, or simply left running when they’re no longer needed. As part of each review, we analyse cloud environments such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud to identify wasted spend and right‑size services. We start by identifying underused or idle resources and downsizing instances which have wasted capacity. We also look to move workloads to more appropriate service tiers and make use of savings plans where necessary. Other actions include removing redundant storage or log retention, reviewing data transfer costs and resizing databases and serverless functions. 

Cloudflare Cost Reduction Through Custom Configuration 

Whilst Cloudflare offers many benefits to organisations, such as speed, security and extra reliability (as a partner, you can find out about them on our Cloudflare page or read our blog post on Cloudflare for Small Businesses: Security and Speed on a Budget) you can easily overpay if your plan contains extras which you don’t use.  

One client was paying for Cloudflare Enterprise, even though their usage didn’t require enterprise-level features across all zones. We started off by analysing their requirements, which allowed us to create a tailored subscription for each zone. This allowed us to migrate their existing zones and configure them on the new account (part Terraform, part manual). We then implemented new monitoring and management controls to ensure that their account was right for their usage. This saved them approximately £27,000 without losing any functionality.  

Using open-source alternatives where possible 

Paid platforms, especially for services like monitoring, can be extremely expensive and often don’t warrant the costs, especially when only a small percentage of the features are actually used.  

For one client who was using a paid platform and was not using all the features, we replaced this with Zabbix, which is an open-source monitoring platform. We started this process by completing proof of concept to show that Zabbix met all monitoring and alerting requirements, installing and configuring the core system, rolling out monitoring across the entire estate and then turning on alerts and thresholds. All of the features were retained, but at zero cost.   

Most companies don’t realise how much they’re overspending until they see the numbers, and the examples in this blog post are just scratching the surface. The largest savings usually come from the areas which are more difficult to spot without deep technical insight. 

If you want to know what you’re truly wasting, visit our IT consultancy page or get in touch, and we can help your company save vast amounts of money.

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