When I comes to IT costs, it pays to trust but verify.

During my tenure at a SO Cal based fintech, there was a lot of wasted money going out the door.

This can happen for number of reasons including?technical staff?get promoted to line management and avoid spending?time on non technical tasks and or are just focused focused on supporting rapid change and technical debt to optimize costs. Another reasons may be not having actionable measurable goals tasking managers to reduce costs.?

Some expensive IT tools were either not used at all such a file integrity monitor (FIM) and a virtualization?capacity tool ( $750k/yr,) overlapping DB tools, over paying vendors like CDN’s for unused features (another?$700k+ savings).

To be fair, IT teams need to be set up for success. Budgeting for a tool alone without identifying named up resources, ensuring resource capacity?paying for training,?professional?services to fully implement them sometimes occur because the true cost of ownership might not get approval, or despite good intentions, a tool is rushed in?to check a box for compliance or audit (see FIM reference) and going back to actually implement a project which you already claimed success may not get priority and pushed to the following year.?it is also sometimes assumed existing staff will maintain and configure tools in addition to doing their day jobs.?When this occurs, products may get patched or upgraded but?they often lack a roadmap to implement new features that come as part of every new release.

Other cost saving opportunities I observed?was in the area of maintenance. Paying the highest level of support for everything?with an HA redundant architecture including non production hardware may not be necessary . On one product for example there was an 19% uplift annually.?

Circuit costs is another area often over looked.?The company had deprecated legacy PBX yet they were paying for hundreds of unused voice lines?dozens?of Toll Free Numbers. This is because the group implementing MS teams and the only legacy voice engineer did not speak.?Data circuits never renegotiated and they were paying 2-4 times the going rate and just lLetting over priced circuits auto renew.?

If your company doesn’t have the resources to manage your IT costs I have had success working with a broker as they helped inventory them and ensure we were getting competing rates, ($800/mth for a 1G internet circuit as opposed to $2,400k+) reviewed?monthly invoices and fought the battles with providers for credits.?

By improving efficiency proactively you will earn credibility with your CFO , COO and when the time comes in which you need funding that trust you built will go a long way.

It’s always a good feeling knowing you leave a company better than you found it it never ceases to surprise how often this is the case.?