Switchfast Blog: The Future of IT
Aging hardware can be much costlier to keep than to replace
Friday, May 15, 2009 by Michael Holley
Thanks to the state of the economy, it's tempting to try and
push the limits of your hardware to delay inevitable upgrades. This
may seem like a money-saving measure on the surface, but the truth
is that there is a significant cost to NOT replacing out-of-date
hardware -- one that can very easily trump the cost to purchase its
replacement.
- Maintenance - Needless to say, old hardware is
much more prone to failure than new hardware. In many instances, it
only takes a few surprise maintenance bills to equal the cost of
completely replacing the piece of equipment in question. Instead of
budgeting for a single, planned upgrade, your company could be
burdened with several unplanned bills and still be left with an
unreliable resource.
- Energy Consumption - Technology is constantly
being forced to meet new energy compliance requirements. Over a
given period of time, newer, more energy-efficient hardware could
recoup a major portion of its cost through savings on your energy
bills.
- Decreased Performance - Sluggish servers and
workstations can affect your employees and customers in
significantly negative ways. Employees can lose hours and hours of
productive time each month simply by spending time waiting for
computers to load their work. By lengthening speed-to-market and
delaying employee responsiveness, opportunities can be lost and the
customer experience irreparably diminished.
- Downtime - This is the worst of them all. All
too often we hear people tell us that they want to continue pushing
their hardware "until it blows up." Not only will these companies
have to pay for the hardware to be replaced anyway, they'll also
have to suffer the consequences of an unforeseeable and potentially
devastating period of downtime sooner or later. What's worse is
that critical systems tend to fail when they're being used the most
- an occurrence that naturally coincides with a business's most
profitable months.
Next time you have to consider a hardware upgrade, make sure you
think about the reasons why that equipment needs replacing when
you're weighing the cost and benefit of the potential purchase.
As always, if you need help crunching any of these numbers or
finding the best prices on purchases, drop us a line (TheFutureOfIT@switchfast.com).
Best,
Michael Holley
Switchfast Technologies
Chicago IT Consulting
& Support
Rochester
IT Consulting & Support
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