It’s that time of year that a good amount of IT departments are dedicating time to researching and planning for their 2018 IT budgets. As you know, the growth of your company and it’s data depends heavily on your IT infrastructure, so the decisions you make and the costs of those choices are very critical.
What Should Your IT Priorities Be 
With so many options available to IT these days, it’s important to know just what your company’s goals are and what your spending priorities should be in order to align your budget with those goals. Streamlining business processes and improving security was a big initiative in 2017, and while these will still be a priority in 2018, there are a lot of companies considering moving to the cloud which brings on an entirely new set of questions and concerns surrounding these two topics.
Outsourcing versus Hiring a FTE
Another consideration that comes up for many CIOs/IT Directors during budget talks is whether or not it’s time to hire another full time DBA, but often the question is, will there be enough work for them to justify keeping them on. Sometimes it makes sense to outsource your projects and let your DBAs handle the day to day activities, or vice versa. Outsource your daily activities, while your DBAs focus on the big project plans. With this in mind, we wanted to remind you that outsourcing some of your IT priorities in many ways can be far less costly than using internal full-time resources. Here is a sampling of the services that we here at SQLWatchmen can provide:
- DBA Services – performance tuning, repairing data corruption, disaster recovery, upgrades, maintenance, and monitoring
- SQL Programming – views, stored procedures, triggers
- Integration Services with SSIS
- Custom Reporting with SSRS
- Cloud Migration (be sure to read Right-Sizing for the Cloud)
- And more!
Bottom line is, just how will IT help to reduce operational costs while increasing scalability, thus paving the path for growth in your organization?
If your company is planning any of the above activities in 2018, we’d be keen to connect with you to see how we can help. We can even assist with handling a lot of the research for you in order to put your projected budget together. For more information on our services, contact us today.
