Rinsing your customers' IT budgets: Squeezing every last bit out of their existing IT infrastructures

By Paul Reynolds, Northern Europe Manager, Crucial.

With worldwide IT spending forecasts failing to meet projections, your customers' IT budgets will continue to be strained, as they struggle to keep up with the explosive demands of an increasingly virtualised world.

From increasing use of advanced analytics, continued digitalisation of services to the growing demand for security applications and mobile support, your customers' IT demands are never-ending.

Therefore, as a trusted channel partner, it is important that you help your customers make use of every last bit of their existing IT infrastructure and continue to deliver the best possible services. If your customers are suffering from shrinking IT budgets, you can still find opportunities to upgrade their IT infrastructures without busting the bank. Here's how:

Increase customers' system performance and longevity with memory upgrades

At only a fraction of the cost of a new system, memory (RAM) upgrades deliver increased performance and allow you to get more years out of an existing machine. Memory upgrades are also one of the best ways to increase the value of your customers' CPU investment. Maximise server CPU utilisation by installing high-density modules in each slot. For customers' desktops and laptops, you'll want to upgrade them in a way that balances costs with the performance needs of the end user.

Improve customers' efficiency and accelerate their virtualised applications with faster storage

SSDs do two things for organisations of all sizes: 1) radically increase workforce performance by delivering instant access to data and 2) help extend system life because they don't rely on small moving parts that are prone to fail (such as hard drives).

By installing SSDs in existing systems, you will stretch your customers' budgets further while increasing their IT performance.

In making the switch, invest in tier 1 brands as you would with HDD's, providing the best performance with the support and reliability you would demand from any OEM, making SSDs a good fit for most businesses. In terms of affordable ways to accelerate server storage and performance, the best approach is to use SSDs for hot data, virtualised applications and operating systems, then use enterprise-class hard drives for cold, bulk data that isn't frequently accessed and used.

Increasing value with limited funds

Increasing IT demands coupled with decreasing funds shouldn't be news to your or your customers. Rather than accepting the obvious limitations, you must find opportunities to maximise customers' budgets and make the most of existing infrastructures.

Utilising new software and technology (such as advanced analytics or IoT) requires powerful hardware, so you want to make the upgrades in the most affordable way possible. The simplest and most cost-effective approach is to maximise the memory and storage in your customers' existing infrastructure. By doing so, you not only increase performance, but also keep hardware costs down – and as a result, your customers' have more flexibility to make other IT investments that will drive future growth.