Dealerships want to focus on selling and servicing cars, not running an IT department. Many dealerships around Australia and New Zealand are paying far too much for servers and maintaining infrastructure onsite. Dealers can typically have a range of servers onsite to host services such as active directory, file servers, remote desktop applications, intranets, print servers, parts catalogues, emails, warehousing systems and the list goes on. Reducing these operating costs can be difficult when there are so many priorities and the fact that many costs seem like they are fixed.
Despite the often confusing and muddy waters of IT, dealerships need to review their fixed costs in this area especially around their infrastructure and network services. As a business, you need to think how to keep pace with the demands for fast, flexible and secure solutions for your dealership.
Some questions to consider; Do you have servers onsite at your dealership? If so, are they nearing end of life? Are you having to pay someone to maintain these servers and perform backups manually? If you answered yes to any of these questions, there are immediate cost savings and efficiency gains to be had.
Here are some strategies to help reduce your costs and overheads:
1. Minimise spend
Exploit immediate cost-reduction opportunities and minimise ongoing expenditures. Review ongoing fixed IT support costs, consolidate vendors, renegotiate service level agreements, licencing costs and other procurement spending.
2. Move to the cloud
Many dealerships are doubling down on cloud spending to improve service delivery to remote workers and customers. Storage and hardware is no longer required to be onsite. The cost of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) can be much lower than owning the infrastructure outright. Resources are only used when needed. IaaS provides scalability without the ongoing overheads.
3. Optimise for security, uptime and efficiency
Manage supply and demand, as well as outsource your IT support to achieve greater alignment across your dealership. For example, utilise a cloud solution that resides in a purpose built data center, with redundancy at the core of all aspects, from the network and server configuration to power and backups. Your business can eliminate fragmentation, complexity, and waste through managed services. You only pay for what you use.
In closing, secure and scalable infrastructure and networks should no longer be regarded as a nice-to-have. Your IT strategy should be seen as a core enabler for digital transformation at your dealership. Within your dealership, you need to be forward thinking and review the latest IT solutions available in the market. You will be surprised at what cost savings can be realised immediately.
If you’d like to learn more about way to reduce costs in your IT department, feel free to get in touch with us. To find out more about our cloud and network services, click here.
