One of a company’s most essential and potentially-volatile business expenses is its IT. How did your IT budget fare in 2024? Are there ways to make your IT Support costs more predictable this year?
We asked PlanetMagpie's own Support Engineers. Their responses included a combination of cybersecurity safeguards, proactive maintenance, and IT policy tips that can help keep your team's IT drama low and productivity high.
Reduce Costs for Desktop Support with These Action Steps
1. Regularly audit your active cloud service user accounts
Example: Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Adobe
How This Helps: Make sure you aren’t paying for user accounts no one uses anymore.
If you’re billed for 25 accounts when your team only needs 22, that’s 3 accounts you can deactivate. What if an employee left the company 3 months ago, but nobody turned off her Microsoft 365 account? Regular audits will catch it.
(PRO TIP: With Microsoft 365 you can change a former employee’s licensed account into a free ‘shared mailbox’ to preserve the data without the licensing cost.)
If you have an MSP, ask them to send you a User Activity Report for each cloud service on a monthly or quarterly basis to validate that separated employees have been removed from service per your offboarding procedures.
2. Ensure that antivirus & anti-malware protection is installed on all computers
Example: Sentinel One
How This Helps: Installing malware protection on workstations is fast and the subscription fees are very reasonable. It greatly lowers the risk of malware infection by providing your support team with alerts and quarantining threats.
Malware attacks cost a lot to resolve, so prevention is worth it. Just like your other subscription services, audit them occasionally to make sure you’re not paying for decommissioned devices.
3. Set up third-party cloud backups for all your Microsoft 365/Google Workspace accounts
Example: Cove Data Protection, Axcient
How This Helps: While cloud services endeavor to keep your data safe and secure, nobody’s perfect. Always keep a third-party backup of cloud service data in another location.
How does this save on support costs? It can save hundreds of hours if/when a cloud service suffers a crash, or a cyberattack. A few dollars a month, as opposed to spending thousands on data recovery is an easy risk management decision.
4. Make sure you have an email filter in place
Example: Proofpoint, modusCloud
How This Helps: Email security filters keep 90-95% of spam out of your employees' inboxes. This saves you money on two fronts. First, your team is more productive since they don't have to spend time deleting hundreds of spam emails throughout the day. Second, ransomware
infections still mostly enter through email. Email filtering reduces the chance of them ever reaching a team member.
5. Remove Local Administrator rights to employee workstations
How This Helps: Giving employees local administrator rights to their computers allows for the installation of unapproved software and may introduce malware. Both of these can seriously damage the operating system and user data, not to mention your entire
network, thereby increasing support costs.
(PRO TIP: If the employee must have admin rights, create a separate ‘admin.employeename’ account to mitigate drive-by installs.)
6. Replace workstations after 4 years in service
How This Helps: Workstations can last longer than 4 years, but you'll start to see performance degradation and hardware issues around then. Also, when a workstation dies unexpectedly, you’ll likely pay a premium for rushed support service (on top
of having an employee who can’t work!).
Keeping your team off aging workstations is a great way to save on support costs. When working on your IT budget for the year, ask your MSP for a hardware report that lists the computers that are over 4 years old and start planning to refresh them.
7. Take cloud and workstation security seriously
Example: MFA, VPN, regular password changes
How This Helps: Using best-practice security protocols will keep your user accounts safe and reduce IT Support intervention. A few examples of those protocols include:
- Set up multi-factor authentication for all cloud accounts
- Use hardware or cloud VPNs to access your network remotely
- Require users to update their network passwords regularly
- Have users get IT approval for new software installations on their workstations
Things like these protect your network and create a security-centric IT environment that keeps your IT drama (and costs) low.
8. Standardize your PC/Mac models
How This Helps: It's easier to support similar models of workstation PCs/Macs. Have your MSP help you select a few standard models to offer to employees and stick with them. They can manage all of them centrally & exchange bad ones quickly if a problem
arises.
9. Keep all operating systems and applications current
How This Helps: Staying current on security patches protects computers against cyberattacks, which can really raise your support costs. The patching can be automated by your MSP to ensure that all your workstations stay current.
10. Don't allow BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
How This Helps: Companies can’t force an employee to install its own antivirus, RMM, or cloud backup solution on a personally owned device. Let alone enforce device encryption or ensure the company’s data stays with the company when the employee
departs. As such, unprotected personal devices run the risk of introducing malware into the company’s network.
If you absolutely need flexibility in this area, create a CYOD policy (Choose Your Own Device) and set up a company-owned device of the employee’s choice with the same policies and server-based safeguards that all company devices have.
(See our previous WOOF article for more: BYOD May Be Popular, But It’s Still a Security Risk)
11. If you don’t already, outsource your tech support to an MSP with a local presence
How This Helps: Outsourcing IT support saves on costs. You get an entire Support team with a full range of technical skills available for less than half the cost of one full-time IT employee. “Going local” means you always have a real person nearby
for difficult support issues that require an on-site visit.
Lower Support Costs Mean a More Productive Workforce
By proactively maintaining and securing your workstations and instituting good IT policy, you can reduce the costs of supporting your IT and increase your company’s day-to-day productivity. Costs saved can be used for better servers, faster network/Internet
access, or stronger backups.
Believe it or not, PlanetMagpie would rather your support costs stay low! That means you can focus on your work, and we can focus on improving your IT.
Ready to plan the 2025 IT budget? Contact our team at woof@planetmagpie.com for more cost-saving ideas!