It was 2013. I came to work in one of the development companies that create software for private users. They told me different things, but least of all I expected to see what I saw: 32 outstanding virtual machines on an obscenely expensive VDS rented at that time, three “free” licenses of Photoshop, 2 Corel, paid and unused IP telephony power and other little things. In the first month, I “cheapened” the infrastructure by 230 thousand rubles, in the second by almost 150 (thousand), then the heroism ended, optimizations began, and as a result, we saved half a million in six months.
The experience inspired us and we began to look for new ways to save money. Now I work elsewhere (guess where), so I can tell the world about my experience with a clear conscience. And you share, let's make IT infrastructure cheaper and more efficient!
“The last wool was plucked with your costs for servers, licenses, IT assets and outsourcing,” the CFO grumbled and demanded planning and budgeting
1. Be nerdy - plan and budget
Planning the budget for your company's IT environment is a boring business, and coordination is sometimes even dangerous. But the very fact of having a budget is almost guaranteed to protect you from:
- cutting costs for the development of the fleet of equipment and software (although there are quarterly optimizations, but you can defend your position there)
- dissatisfaction of the financial director or accounting department at the time of purchase or lease of the next element of infrastructure
- manager's anger due to unplanned spending.
Budgeting is necessary not only in large companies - literally in any. Collect software and hardware requirements from all departments, calculate the required capacity, take into account the dynamics of changes in the number of staff (for example, your call center or support increases in a busy season and decreases in a free season), justify expenses and develop a budget plan broken down by periods ( ideal - by months). In this way, you will know exactly how much money you will receive for your resource-intensive tasks, and optimize costs.
2. Use the budget correctly
After the budget is agreed and signed, there is a hell of a temptation to redistribute costs and, for example, swell the entire budget into an expensive server where you can deploy all DevOps with monitoring and gateways 🙂 In this case, you may find yourself in resource shortage mode for other tasks and get an overage. Therefore, focus solely on real needs and business tasks that require computing power to solve.
3. Upgrade servers on time
Outdated iron servers, as well as virtual ones, do not bring any benefit to the organization - they raise questions in terms of security, speed and intelligence. You spend more time, effort and money on compensating for missing functionality, on eliminating security problems, on some kind of speed-up patches. Therefore, upgrade your hardware and virtual resources - for example, you can do it right now with our promotion , prices are not ashamed to show on Habré.
By the way, I have often come across situations when an iron server in the office was a completely unjustified decision: most small and medium-sized businesses can solve all problems on virtual capacities and save a lot of money.
4. Optimize the user experience
Teach all your users to save electricity and use infrastructure carefully. Here are examples of typical overruns on the user side:
- Installing unnecessary applications on a “for the whole department” principle - users ask to install software like a neighbor, because they need or simply form an application like “7 Photoshop licenses for the design department”. At the same time, four people work with Photoshop in the design department, and the other three are layout designers, and they use it every six months. In this case, it is better to purchase 4 licenses, and solve 1-2 tasks per year with the help of colleagues. But more often such a story happens with office software (in particular, the MS Office package, which absolutely everyone needs in full). In fact, the vast majority of employees can make do with open source editors or the practical Google Docs.
- Users occupy virtual resources and methodically eat up all the rented capacities - for example, testers like to create loaded virtual machines and forget to at least pay them off, developers do not disdain this either. The recipe is simple: when leaving, extinguish everyone 🙂
- Users use the company's servers as a global file storage: they upload photos (in RAW), videos, upload gigabytes of music, especially inveterate ones can even create a small game server at working capacities (we condemned such people on the corporate portal in a humorous form - it worked very cool).
- Expensive employees in every sense drag pirated software to work, and here they are, fines, problems with the police and vendors. Work with permissions and policies, because they will drag you anyway, even if you push tearful speeches in the corporate cafeteria and write motivational posters.
- Users believe that they have the right to demand any tool convenient to them. So, I had Trello, Asana, Wrike, Basecamp and Bitrix24 rentals in my arsenal. Because each project manager chose a convenient or familiar product for his department. As a result, 5 supported solutions, 5 different price tags, 5 accounts, 5 different marketplaces and tunings, etc. No integration, unification and end-to-end automation for you - a solid cerebral hemorrhoids. As a result, in agreement with the general, I closed the shop, chose Asana, helped migrate the data, trained my fierce colleagues myself and saved quite a lot, including strength and nerves.
In general, negotiate with users, train them, conduct an educational program and strive to make their work and your work easier. In the end, they will be grateful to you for the order in business, and managers - for cutting costs. Well, probably, you, my dear Habr pros, have noticed that the solution to these problems is nothing more than the formation of corporate information security. For this special thanks to the system administrator (you won’t thank yourself ...).
5. Combine cloud and desktop solutions
In general, based on the fact that I work in a hosting provider and at the end of the article I am full of desire to tell you about a cool sale of server capacities for companies of any size, I should wave the flag and shout “All to the clouds!”. But then I'll sin against my engineering background and look like a marketer. Therefore, I urge you to approach the issue wisely and combine cloud and desktop solutions. For example, you can rent as a service (SaaS) a cloud-based CRM system, and according to the booklet it costs 1000 rubles. per user per month - mere pennies (I will omit the issue of implementation, it has already been discussed on Habré). So, in three years you will spend 10 rubles for 360 employees, 000 for 4, 480 for 000, etc. At the same time, you can implement desktop CRM by paying for competitive licenses (+5 to savings) for about 600 thousand rubles. and serve it like the same photoshop. Sometimes the benefit in a period of 000-100 years is really impressive.
Conversely, cloud computing often allows you to save on hardware, engineer salaries, data protection issues (but don’t save on them at all!), scaling. Cloud tools are easy to connect and disconnect, the cost of clouds does not fall into the capital costs of the company - in general, there are a lot of pluses. Choose cloud solutions when it makes sense in terms of scale, agility and flexibility.
Count, combine and choose winning combinations - I will not give a universal recipe, they are different for each business: someone refuses the clouds completely, someone builds their entire business in the clouds. By the way, never refuse software updates (even paid ones) - as a rule, developers of application software for business roll out more stable and functional versions.
And another rule for software: get rid of old software that brings in less than it consumes for maintenance and support. There is definitely a similar one on the market.
6. Avoid software duplication
I have already talked about five project management systems in my IT zoo, but I will take it out in a separate paragraph. Abandoned certain software, chose new software - do not forget to stop paying for the old one, found new hosting services - terminate the contract with the old provider, if there are no special considerations. Track employee software usage profiles and get rid of unused and duplicate software.
Ideally, if you have a system for monitoring and analyzing installed software, this way you can see working duplicates and problems automatically. By the way, this kind of work helps the company avoid duplication and repetition of data - sometimes the search for the one who screwed up takes too much time.
7. Comb application infrastructure and peripherals
But who considers these consumables: cartridges, flash drives, paper, chargers, UPSs, printers, and so on. tube disks. But in vain. Start with paper and printers - analyze print profiles and make a network of printers or MFPs with public access, you will be surprised how much paper and cartridges can be saved and how much the cost per sheet will be reduced. And no, this is not petty, this is the optimization of an important process. No one forbids printing term papers and abstracts on office equipment, but it is too much to print books that it is a pity to buy or reluctant to read from the screen.
Further, always have a stock of consumables that you purchase from suppliers at a discount, so that in case of problems with equipment, you do not buy at exorbitant prices at the nearest technomarket. Keep track of depreciation and wear, keep records and form a replacement fund - by the way, it's nice to have a replacement fund for basic office equipment. Just because you will not be praised for downtime at work, this is also a loss of money, especially in trading and service companies.
As for the applied infrastructure, there are two main cost items: the Internet and communications. When choosing a provider, look at package offers, read the stars on the tariffs, pay attention to the quality of communication and SLA. Some admins decide not to bother and buy, for example, IP-telephony in a package with a paid virtual PBX, which is also a monthly subscription. Do not be lazy, buy only traffic and learn how to work with Asterisk - this is the best that has been created in the field of VATS and an almost hassle-free solution for business tasks of small and medium businesses (if you have direct hands).
8. Document and create instructions for employees
It's lazy and necessary. Firstly, it will be easier for you to work, and secondly, the adaptation of beginners will be seamless. Finally, you yourself will know that your infrastructure is up-to-date, complete and in perfect order. Compile safety instructions, short manuals for users, FAQ, describe the rules and regulations for the use of office equipment. A materially existing instruction is much more convincing than words; one can always turn to it. This way you can send a link to the document for any relevant question and not accept the "I wasn't warned" argument. So you save a lot on eliminating errors.
9. Outsource
Even if you have a whole IT department in your company or, on the contrary, a small infrastructure, it is not shameful to use the services of outsourcers. Why not get the services of great professionals specialized in something complex, for little money, that is, without buying such a specialist in the state. Outsource a part of DevOps, print service, administration of a busy site, if you have one, support and a call center. Your value will not fall from this, on the contrary, you will receive additional expertise in the field of contacts with third-party contractors.
If your manager thinks that outsourcing is expensive, just explain to him how much he will have to pay a dedicated specialist. Really works.
10. Don't get involved in open source and your development
I am an engineer, I am a developer in the past and I firmly believe that it is open source that saves the world - what are the libraries, monitoring systems, server management systems, etc. worth. But if your company decides to buy open source CRM, ERP, ECM, etc. or the boss at the meeting shouts that you will burn your billing on your knee, save the ship, it is going to the reefs. Here are the arguments on which to stand in the face of an inspired leader with a burning eye:
- open source is poorly supported if it is a public repository or very expensive to maintain if it is open source from companies (DBMS, office suites, etc.) - you will literally pay for every question, request and ticket;
- an internal specialist to deploy an internal open source product will be very expensive due to its rarity;
- open source improvements can be severely limited by knowledge, skill, or even licensing;
- with open source, you don’t start for a very long time and it will be too difficult for you to adapt it to business processes.
Needless to say, your own development is a very long and expensive undertaking? From my own experience, I can say that it takes about three years to get a working prototype that meets business requirements and the ability to let users work in it. And then, if you have a good team of programmers (you can look at the salaries on My Circle - the conclusions will come up for yourself).
So I will be banal and repeat: consider all the options.
So, to summarize briefly, to make sure that I didn’t forget anything:
- count money - compare different options, consider factors, compare;
- strive to reduce the time for maintenance and user training, reduce the risk of "fool intervention";
- try to consolidate and integrate technologies - a harmonious architecture and end-to-end automation decide;
- invest in IT development, do not live with outdated technologies - they will suck money;
- correlate the demand and consumption of IT resources.
You may ask - why save other people's money, since the office pays? Logical question! But your ability to optimize costs and manage IT assets effectively is primarily your experience and your professional profile. We all know how to make candy from improvised materials here 🙂
У as an excellent opportunity to upgrade virtual capacities. Come in, look, choose - there is very little left until April 30th.
For the rest, the traditional 10% with promo code habrahabr10.
Source: habr.com