Do you know what to expect when it comes to budgeting for your growing company’s IT needs? Can you provide investors accurate costs to deliver your services? Without predictability in your business' approach to IT, you can’t accurately plan a budget for the next four to five years. This lack of consistency and ability to budget can hamper a business' scalability.

How does standardization of a budget affect the ability to grow?

When your business has standardization built into its network, you can anticipate not only your capital expenses but also the operational cost of running your business from a technology standpoint. And that’s when you can accurately budget for growth within the business – from knowing the technology cost for a new employee to the cost of building or acquiring a new location. Standardization will also let you calculate the financial impact of investing in new software and what the total cost of ownership is for that investment.

The risks of an unpredictable budget include:

• Inability to provide leadership or investors with accurate growth plans and costs for the organization.
• Inability to hold IT accountable for their investments and recommendations.
• Inability to prioritize new IT investments. 
• Overall frustration of team members towards the IT department and feeling “held hostage” by the lack of knowledge.

How does a company standardize its IT expenses?

A game-changer for businesses facing large investments in their IT infrastructure is cloud computing, which refers to anything that involves hosted services over the internet. This can include servers, storage, databases, networking, software and more. The cloud allows businesses to access their information on any device with an internet connection.

As cloud services have matured through the years, IT solutions provided through a Managed Services Provider (MSP) have become the norm for growing businesses because they require less startup investments and reduce overall maintenance and replacement costs. An MSP typically charges a monthly fee, allowing the company to predict its costs rather than having to purchase expensive hardware every three to five years. Most businesses see at least a 25% cost savings when switching to an MSP.

This pay-as-you-consume model is attractive to growing companies that often lack the resources to employ their own IT staff as MSPs often have multiple highly qualified expert engineers who can take the worry out of business technology.

C Spire Business' Rusty Goodsell has more than 15 years of experience building IT strategies for businesses of all sizes in a variety of industries.