When a business’s revenue falls and costs rise, the first impulsive desire is to “cut everything secondary.” The list of supposedly minor expenses almost always includes IT: servers, licenses, user support, salaries of system administrators. At the level of intuition, it looks logical – the technique works, which means we can temporarily shrink. The problem is that IT is no longer an auxiliary service, but the basis of operational activities. Sales, accounting, logistics, document management, customer service and access to money pass through it. Trying to pretend that IT is just a cost item that can be sharply cut does not result in savings, but in a managed or unmanaged halt of processes. The real challenge is to reduce IT costs without losing functionality. This can only be achieved by a clear prioritization of services and a strategically verified transition to outsourcing.
Why the decision “leave them alone, they can handle it” leads to collapse
The classic picture in mature small and medium-sized businesses is a small but vital internal IT department. As a rule, these are three key links working in conjunction: a senior system administrator who holds the entire architecture, his young assistant who solves operational tasks “on the ground” (from replacing the cartridge to setting up the workplace), and a narrow specialist in critical business systems, for example 1C.
Faced with the need for drastic savings, management often makes the seemingly logical and simple decision to leave three people alone. Formally, the wage fund has been reduced, in the reporting there is a beautiful indicator. In fact, this is a puzzle where all the answer options are incorrect.
Keep the senior sysadmin? It will be torn apart by a flurry of daily requests from users. He physically will not be able to simultaneously run between offices, changing equipment, and administer servers, network, security system. Infrastructure will begin to crumble without prevention.
Keep “1C expert”? He is not aware of thousands of nuances of the network and server infrastructure. When the servers stand up and the connection disappears, the accounting department will not work either.
Keep a young assistant? He simply does not have the experience or competencies to administer complex systems and support the same 1C.
The end result is the same. First, minor failures accumulate, then they add up in a chain, and the business begins to lose pace, customers and money. In an attempt to plug the holes, the management decides to save on everything: cut the Internet speed, abandon CRM, look for the cheapest specialist on the recommendation of friends.
At this stage, it becomes clear that instead of bringing the staff to one exhausted person, it was wiser to build an IT system from the very beginning, where an external IT partner performs some of the functions. Inside there are only those roles that are really justified, and all routine and highly expert tasks are carried out by the team outside according to understandable regulations.
Why IT suffers and how it turns out in the long run
From the point of view of psychology, IT management is often perceived as a “background” service. Sales, marketing, PR – in plain sight, their contribution is understandable: they bring applications, transactions, and mentions. IT professionals are in the shadows. While everything works, they are rarely remembered.
But for the company, such “invisibility” turns into a real disaster. The main loss is not even working hands, but informal knowledge. Together with the dismissed system administrator, the company loses a live, constantly updated map of its information system. In small and medium-sized businesses, there is almost never a full-fledged up-to-date documentation on IT infrastructure. It appears, as a rule, only with the arrival of the first external auditor or IT partner, when someone from the outside begins to record methodically “how everything really works.”
A competent IT outsourcer comes with the obligation to document the entire circuit, build understandable processes and store knowledge in documents that belong to the customer company. This reduces the risk of total dependence on a specific person and makes the cost reduction itself a manageable and predictable process.
IT outsourcing today naturally repeats the path that accounting and HR have already passed, when at first everything was done exclusively within the company, then they began to transfer routine or complex narrow tasks to external contractors, and today the hybrid model (a combination of internal full-time specialist and external expert services) has become the norm.
Auditing as a growth point
The word “audit” often causes resistance among internal specialists, they expect a search for the guilty person and criticism. In practice, a competent external check is primarily a snapshot of the current state, and not debriefing. Based on this honest “terrain map,” it is already possible to see objectively the real interconnections of systems, assess risks and make informed decisions: what can be optimized, what can be taken to the cloud, and what can be transferred to an outsourcer for service.
In fact, this is the first and most important step towards prioritizing services – dividing into what is critical for business survival here and now, and what belongs to the sphere of convenience or long-term development, but not to vital functions. Without such diagnostics, any IT budget cut turns into a series of random decisions, their consequences will appear after the reduction – in the form of failures, delays and loss of manageability.
Why the departure of a key IT specialist is really dangerous
When a leading system administrator leaves a company, it’s not just about closing a vacancy. Along with it, access to the “invisible part” of the IT landscape goes away.
In addition to standard logins and passwords, your CRM, mail server or account system can have dozens of hidden administrative logins, service accounts, and backup access schemes. These details are rarely fully fixed somewhere. A specialist can forget some of them, and some of them cannot be deliberately transferred if there was a conflict during dismissal. The new team that comes to put things in order will have to look for backdoors and restore access in technically complex ways. It’s always time, money and downtime risk.
If critical systems are located in their own server room, IT at least has a chance to “get to the hardware” and restore control. But when it comes to external sites and cloud services with incomprehensible current administration, the return of full control becomes a long and expensive project. At the start of cooperation, a professional outsourcer is obliged to record all accesses, establish password change regulations, and prescribe the procedure for transferring rights. Control over information systems becomes formalized and tied to the company as a customer, and not to a specific person. This is one of the key and seemingly unobvious ways to reduce risks and preserve functions without excessive spending.
Three steps to reduce IT costs wisely
When you really need to “cut” quickly, a healthy reaction is not to randomly fire people and turn off services, but to follow an understandable algorithm.
Step 1. Total IT Inventory
All IT costs need to be critically reviewed and divided into three unequal groups.
Critical services and basic infrastructure. This is what a business, in principle, cannot work without a day: key sales systems (CRM), general documents, backups, accounting (1C), basic communication, Internet access, corporate mail. Touching this group is extremely dangerous – its task is not to “paint the facade,” but to maintain vital functions.
- Ancillary and redundant services. This is where “quiet luxury” – the main reserve for savings – usually hides. These are cloud services with inflated tariffs, “reserve” licenses, software subscriptions that few people use, outdated backup equipment. An illustrative example is a postal service for 20 employees with a payment of 500 rubles per month per user. On the monthly horizon, the amount seems small, but 120,000 rubles run over the year. For this money, you can either deploy your own solution, or choose a more rational tariff without losing the necessary functions.
- People and support format. Here lies the largest item of fixed expenses (payroll, taxes, workplace) and at the same time the highest risk of losing control. But this is also the point where IT outsourcing during a crisis becomes not just a service, but a strategic tool for transformation.
- Critical services and core infrastructure. These are the things a business simply can’t operate without: key sales systems (CRM), shared documents, backups, accounting (1C), basic communications, internet access, and corporate email. Touching this group is extremely dangerous—its purpose is to support vital functions.
Step 2. Decide whether to save, optimize, or disable
Based on the inventory, specific decisions are made. If a service or function is removed, you need to think in advance how the corresponding business process will be rebuilt. The task of a competent IT partner at this stage is to help carry out this “operation” as accurately as possible, suggesting what can be consolidated, what to replace, and what to abandon without fatal damage to critical processes.
Step 3. Outsource support for optimized infrastructure
After analysis and planning, a natural question arises: who will now support this optimized, but still complex infrastructure? Maintaining a full-fledged staff in the new economic conditions often becomes impractical. Outsourcing functions becomes a logical and effective completion of this path, allowing you to fix costs in the contract and gain access to the broad expertise necessary to maintain the operability of key services.
Why modern outsourcing is not an “incomprehensible service”
Owners’ skepticism about outsourcing often stems from the experience of ten to fifteen years ago, when the market was flooded with casual specialists and small firms without processes and responsibility. The result is broken deadlines, unfulfilled obligations and persistent distrust of the “transfer IT to a contract” model.
Modern professional IT outsourcing is based on completely different principles. It is a service based on processes, clear SLAs (service level agreement) and transparent game rules. Thanks to this, outsourcing allows not only to reduce the budget, but also to improve the quality of support. Business receives not one person, but a team with different competencies and interchangeability.
Hybrid model is golden mean
The most comfortable and efficient way for businesses to outsource is a hybrid model. It removes the main fears of the owners. The company retains a junior IT employee who solves simple but important tasks “on the ground”: change the cable, go to the server room, reboot the equipment, help the employee with software configuration. At the same time, a whole team of external specialists plays the expensive role of senior system administrator, architect and security expert.
Financially, this configuration is often more profitable than keeping one “full-fledged” expert on staff, because the cost of outsourcing services in a hybrid model is usually tens of percent lower than the total cost of salary, taxes, workplace and social package of a specialist of the same level. Instead of the risk of “one key person left and took all the knowledge,” the business gets access to a pool of competencies and a predicted level of service.
After the crisis: not to roll back, but to build a new, stronger model
When the acute phase of the crisis has passed, the most important step is not just to return the previous staff and list of services, but to rethink what really worked. Which services have really proven their effectiveness in difficult times, and which ones only spent the budget?
In this new stable phase, IT is finally no longer perceived as a “service function” and is approved as a direct tool for business development and competition. From now on, any decision on the development of technology should answer the question: what specific business problem does it solve and what economic effect does it bring?
For example, the introduction of electronic document management is not just a technological update, but a specific step to accelerate key processes, which instantly delivers documents to the counterparty instead of spending a whole day of the courier’s work and his resources. Automating routine operations in the sales department is not abstract optimization, but a direct way to reduce the cost of the customer acquisition process and free up human resources for tasks that generate revenue, and not just maintain the current state.
A company that went through a crisis with a conscious IT transformation has already seen the cost of mistakes. This is the basis for a more adult, pragmatic approach to development.
Outsourcing as a strategic investment in sustainability
Thus, the crisis becomes not only a time of loss and limitation, but also a unique opportunity for a strategic reset of the entire approach to information technology. In this situation, the transition to IT outsourcing plays the role of not just a “lifeline,” but a tool that allows you to go through a difficult stage in a controlled and lossless manner.
It is important to distinguish between participants’ motivations. A full-time specialist during a period of turbulence inevitably thinks about personal stability and career options. For a professional IT partner, the sustainability and development of the client is a matter of their own reputation and long-term contracts. Therefore, the decision to work with a trusted external partner is not a rejection of control, but a deliberate step towards a more manageable, transparent and sustainable IT model. One in which technology supports business and its growth, rather than turning into an unpredictable risk factor.
By Anatoly Volkov, IT and information security expert and founder of Soltecs