The importance of investing in IT infrastructure

Jamie Cozens, co-founder of Maple Computing talks about the importance of not standing still during the new normal we find ourselves in.

There’s a saying that if you stand still, you will go backwards. This is true of IT infrastructure; and in a world where businesses are looking to improve productivity, sales, customer experience and derive better ROIs, technologies such as IoT, AI and cloud are transforming capabilities and helping to accelerate their growth.

As with anything, there is a cost attached to this. The first step in the journey to digital transformation takes significant investment and resource to integrate their existing IT platforms. However, the investment in these legacy platforms can be a barrier in itself and limits the opportunity to benefit from transformational technologies that will allow businesses to become more agile and benefit from market forces more readily.

As we find ourselves navigating this new normal, there are definite lessons we can take from the past. For example, just over a decade ago, the global markets were hit by the credit crunch. While many businesses, and arguably even more now, leaned on IT to do business, they were looking to do more with less, cut costs, work out efficiencies.

However, experience tells us that this may not always be the right path. A good example of this is two of the big supermarkets in 2008 took very different approaches – one battened down the hatches, kept costs low, tried to do the same with less money, kept the lights on, the doors open and stock on the shelves.

The other took a very different approach. It took the opportunity to invest with the sole aim of increasing ROI, driving expansion. This accelerated the business in terms of market share coming out of a difficult economic climate and paved the way for the future.

So, the moral of the story is, that being prudent may be the right thing for your business, but that doesn’t mean that cutting costs and not investing to reduce costs is the right thing.

Flexible financing and leasing are crucial in enabling businesses that want to transform their digital capabilities in a way that helps them to flatten the ‘cost spike’ and maintain cash reserves. These types of solutions overcome some of the barriers and challenges faced by businesses when they are putting together the business case, such as, investment and ongoing costs of existing or legacy IT systems, budget constraints and lowering costs. 

The fact is that by utilising financing and leasing solutions, businesses will benefit from much more than simply preserving cash reserves; it adds more predictable costs and means that they will benefit from added flexibility.

We work with businesses that are looking to invest for a multitude of reasons, but with the shared goal of being able to do business better. They come to us because they are looking for a partner they can trust, that are technically competent and can therefore understand their current IT infrastructure environment and take them as painlessly as possible on the next part of their journey to digital transformation.  

By putting off the decisions that can be made today until tomorrow, businesses are making a false economy. Consider how much that decision is potentially costing in terms of reduced productivity; and maybe even more important, is to think about the opportunities being missed. Something that is incalculable.

Financing and leasing options flattens out the cost spike and allows the business to benefit from the ROI far quicker, benefiting them at a time when productivity gains are most important. Can you afford to stand still?