IT departments are under pressure to accelerate digital transformation at a time that corporate budgets are under immense pressure. With vast amounts of technology spending required just to keep infrastructure secure and running smoothly, there is often little money left to innovate.
That’s why technology expense management is becoming an essential discipline. Here is our guide to five ways CIOS can use cloud and telecom expense management software to run a smarter and more cost-effective operation, so that they can free up budget for digital transformation projects that help the business to grow.
- Empower users to monitor and manage voice and data usage
CIOs and IT managers don’t enjoy policing how their colleagues use their mobile data or voice minutes. However, in the absence of tight controls, wastage and abuse of company resources can seep in. Most companies can achieve cost savings by sending automated alerts to end users when they’re exceeding their voice and data applications, or when they are incurring out-of-bundle costs. They can also empower users to track monthly mobile spend via a mobile app to help them use resources in a smarter way.
- Gain visibility into spending with automated tools
Peter Drucker’s maxim, ‘You can't manage what you can't measure’ applies to cloud and telecom spending, too. To reduce your telecoms and IT costs, you first need to be able to measure them accurately. In today’s complex environment, it’s just not possible to do so by manually combing through spreadsheets and invoices.
Cutting edge telecoms and cloud expense management tools can offer you better visibility into your spending. You’ll gain insights into your inventory, spending trends across different teams and cost centres, duplicate charges, billing errors, and more to help you cut costs. Smarter tools can give you dashboards and reports to guide your spending.
- Automate processes to simplify operations
Automation of processes such as network management, security operations, and systems configuration is a reliable way to simplify operations and save money. Smarter automated telecom expense management, for example, can free the IT department from manual labour involved in tracking spending, provisioning services and managing service requests. The time freed up through automation to can be used to innovate rather than simply keeping the lights on.
- Sharpen vendor and service provider management
Rather than simply rubber-stamping renewals of contracts with service providers and vendors, companies should audit spending to identify opportunities for optimisation. This includes benchmarking providers’ costs in competitive bids, ensuring that you are not paying for services and contracts you no longer use, and benchmarking providers against service level agreements.
- Introduce FinOps best practices
Many IT departments are benefiting from shifting from capital spending to operational expenditure through cloud migration. However, some are struggling to get to grips with the variable nature of cloud spending and have seen cloud costs soar. FinOps processes and practices can help your organisation to get a handle on cloud spending.
FinOps enables organisations to be more proactive about managing costs and optimising usage. It creates a culture where costs are continuously measured and optimised to ensure your business is getting value for money. It can help you curb wasteful practices and gain insight into how you can access resources at more competitive prices.
With FinOps, you can move from detecting and enforcing cloud cost policy violations retrospectively to detecting and even preventing them in real time. Alerts can be triggered when a development team or user violates a policy, such as running unused instances for more than a week, for instance.
The knowledgeable team at 1Nebula helps businesses evaluate their cloud and telecom costs and get clear and actionable data insights. We can help you accelerate digital transformation and implement smarter technology expense management practices. Contact us to find out about our cutting edge telecoms, DevOps and FinOps expertise.