Every network and IT teams have two things they share in common: highly demanding users who expect to receive efficient network availability around the clock and tight budgets. Competing for business and IT priorities put all tech- investments to test to justify the returns they get. However, it is very easy to find yourself in a tough spot, especially if you have a questioning authority if your margins are slimmer than they should be.
Indeed, installing, training, and maintaining the team for an upgraded network tech can be both time consuming and complicated. This is where the IT team needs to be more aware of their tech investment returns and how they can be improved.
But why is it so important to calculate IT ROI? Here are some reasons!
- Tech investment makes business operations and IT more efficient - reducing waste, abuse, and fraud
- When implemented right, it can improve inter-departmental communications, making for a more effective and organized company that keeps customers happy and satisfied
- Improved data analysis can identify weaknesses and strengths, lowering costs, driving process improvements, and improving ROI
In short, there's no way you can fail to justify technology investment in business networking. While such implementations come at a cost and may not offer monetary results right away, but having an ROI calculation in hand can definitely bring about positive hopes from the future.
And when it comes to network tech, security is usually the most major concern of organizations these days. It is even considered as an insurance policy (usually a costlier one) which allows taking all the important measures to protect the business.
Why is Tech Investment Essential for Networking
Most organizations want to reduce the risk of downtime as much as possible. This isn't surprising, especially if we think about the Telstra's five outages. The experience ought to keep the fear of downtime alive for a long time.
In recent years, coming across news about high-profile companies with technology failures and experiencing the consequences have become a norm. And unfortunately, such things cannot be covered by blaming the cost of network monitoring.
In short, anything that helps an organization keep operations up and running can be anything but invaluable. Outages are normal and quite inevitable. The only way to keep yourself from crumbling down in such an incident is to set up the right network monitoring solutions. It may involve cost and take IT some time, but the fixes implemented are long-term solutions that you are looking for. And this makes tech investment in network valuable.
To prove the ROI for network tech investment and overcome the objections, it is also important to train your team. With Cisco training, the IT team will be more capable of calculating ROI and take all important measures to reduce the network maintenance cost and cost associated with support over time to further improve the ROI. Cisco certification enables an IT professional to use the right steps for reducing frequent outages and boost end-user productivity.
Network Tech Investment Returns Factors
Network monitoring tech returns usually come from a variety of different areas. With the help of Cisco training, you can train your IT technicians to upgrade and maintain equipment, answer support calls, configure new users, and plan network changes and expansions.
Technology helps reduce and maintain headcount offers without compromising on the definitive returns. It enables the networking team to pay more attention to strategic projects for better results. Here are five possible area through which network monitoring can deliver a more desirable ROI.
Cost Reduction by Saving Salary and Time
It is easier to calculate the ROI if you are making a noticeable cutback by salary saving. If tech allows automated network monitoring, it will reduce the requirement for the staff to carry out that job. This would simply reduce salaries and even overtime costs.
Also, the organization can utilize its current IT staff towards another project and whatever the business realizes as a result of the operations should also be incorporated in the ROI calculation.
Avoiding or Minimizing Outages
High-tech network monitoring alerts IT professionals about potential outages and breakdowns before they are escalated, and the damage goes beyond repair. Network error percentages, rates, round-trip times, statistics, and availability can vary depending on the alert the team receives.
Such alerts keep the staff alert, who in return also ensure that the system is up and running without the risk of an outage. This improves the overall organizational productivity and contributes towards a healthier ROI.
Reducing Repair/Fix Time
Trained IT technicians can utilize tech applications for network monitoring, which does not only notifies the staff of a possible problem but also provides geographic maps and diagnostic data for locating the place and devices to track the performance issues.
The procedure that could take hours if not days to get resolved can be taken care of in just a matter of minutes. The constraint for the long-distance distributed network is also diminished. Last but not least, the travel budgets also reduce drastically if the problem fixing required long commutes to a site.
Reduction in Support Calls
Communicating with the users and keeping them both productive and online can be both time-consuming and critical in a management role. When problems are reported, the entire network gets engaged in solving the issue.
With technology applications providing network solutions, the staff can be notified for potential problems even before they are reported. Problems like high error percentages, excessive use of bandwidth, and other metrics can be fixed before the impact grows.
Reducing Downtime
Network outage or system downtime can reduce both commercial activity and employee productivity. It's a cost that business fails to incorporate. A high-tech network monitoring system can reduce downtime to a great extent. The savings, however, depends on the downtime factor and the employee productivity over a given period of time.
With a tight IT budget, making technology investment in networking may not seem like the best idea. However, only when an organization focuses on the positive returns such investments can yield it becomes favorable.
ROI is a highly subjective thing, which may vary according to different business structures. Thus, it is important to work with a trained team to analyze if you are actually making more money than you are investing.