By Jackson Connell, Senior Manager, Product & Solutions at Riverbed

CEOs have a math problem. Organizations are being forced to find strategic areas to cut costs to keep pace while IT spend continues to grow exponentially. Gartner^® shared in its "Quick Answer: What Can IT Leaders Do to Counter Endpoint Cost Inflation?" report from October 2022 that inflation and supply chain challenges have resulted in device costs rising up 20% since the beginning of 2021. Gartner also forecasted that end-user spending on public cloud services would grow 20.7 percent in 2023 in its "Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide 2020-2026, 3Q22 Update." 

To solve this math problem, leaders are looking to trim costs without sacrificing the employee digital experience, which would hamper productivity and offset any savings gained by cutting costs. One of the key places that leaders are looking to exercise waste is lowering their IT asset costs: reducing device, software, and network costs. Here are a few ways CIOs are making that happen.

Smart device refresh

Instead relying on age to indicate when it's time to refresh a device, many companies are leveraging observability tools that measure the actual user experience and performance of employee devices. This checkup can help determine if a machine requires replacing, needs a simple upgrade, or is completely healthy and can continue to be used. By knowing and using the actual health of employee devices to determine refresh schedules, instead of choosing a random date, enterprises can drastically reduce their spend on device replacements while ensuring their employees have high performing devices.

Eliminating wasted software licenses

A 2020 SaaS trends report indicated that 38% of IT spend is wasted due to under-used licenses. Moreover, the average organization wastes more than $135,000 a year on unused, underutilized, duplicate licenses, and shadow IT. As the use of SaaS tools continues to grow, it becomes extremely difficult for IT teams to monitor and track software usage across the enterprise. Centralized Digital Experience Management solutions can automatically discover every application in the organization and measure its actual usage. With this level of insight, enterprise IT teams can identify unused or underused licenses and get a handle on shadow IT applications to reign in bloated software spend.

Reducing network bottlenecks

As enterprises continue on their digital transformation journey, networks have become incredibly complex. IT teams are being asked to manage both new cloud architectures and legacy infrastructure simultaneously making it easy to lose sight of potential bottlenecks. CIOs are increasingly focusing on proactive identification of trouble spots before they become crises. IT leaders are spending more time with their network performance monitoring tools to gain a better picture of the communications flowing across their entire infrastructure. These tools can help significantly reduce network costs across the digital enterprise by streamlining data transport and diminishing network latency and congestion.

Reigning in cloud spend

Many enterprises are struggling to monitor and understand their public cloud spend. Without an in-depth understanding of where cloud traffic is going and how that's impacting spend, cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control. It's critical for enterprises to leverage network and cloud monitoring solutions that can help prioritize traffic according to importance, reduce round trip traffic to the cloud, and provide a clear look into where exactly your cloud spend is going. This insight enables enterprises to not only optimize their network and cloud performance, but significantly cut back on wasteful spending like unnecessary cloud egress costs.

Managing IT asset costs

Enterprises cannot afford to sacrifice their digital experience or slow down their digital transformation projects, but the reality is IT budgets are not keeping pace with rising costs. This is evidenced by the Gartner^® report "Quick Answer: What Can IT Leaders Do to Counter Endpoint Cost Inflation?" report from October 2022 which found that 73% of surveyed IT leaders are being asked to find ways to reduce spend or to streamline costs.

Consequently, enterprises are relentlessly focusing on making sure that their IT budgets are utilized strategically and eliminating wasteful spending. By optimizing their devices, software, network, and cloud infrastructure enterprises can square the circle of a complicated math problem by simultaneously reducing costs, enhancing the digital experience, and improving employee productivity.

##

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jackson Connell is the senior manager, product and solutions at Riverbed, where he is responsible for Riverbed’s cross-product solutions. Prior to joining Riverbed, Jackson held roles at multiple cybersecurity startups including Threat Stack and iboss, where he was responsible for public relations, analyst relations, internal communications, and content marketing. Jackson also spent several years at LPP, a PR firm specializing in technology and healthtech, where he managed communications programs for clients across a range of industries, including cybersecurity, telecommunications, healthcare and network infrastructure. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Northeastern University.