How to optimise your ICT infrastructure maintenance costs

Get the most out of your ICT infrastructure maintenance

It’s unlikely you’ve ever had the luxury of refreshing 100% of your ICT infrastructure all in one go. Your stable of hardware equipment has built up incrementally over time. Server upgrades here, a new storage system there…

Taken as a whole, it represents many years of purchasing, multiple vendors and differing ages. That makes it difficult to visualise – let alone optimise – your overall maintenance contracts, and many businesses just go on renewing the support packages they entered into on purchasing each piece of equipment. Then, when the vendor declares ‘end of service life’, they see no alternative but to purchase replacement equipment. But it’s not the way it has to be!

When you next audit your existing support arrangements and learn the three key operating criteria to help categorise your hardware and strategically reduce your operational expendure.

1. Critical business systems

Some of your hardware is business critical. If it is supporting your core business applications, it simply cannot afford to fail and, if it does, you’ll have failover systems ready to go in minutes if not seconds. Systems supporting your contact centre, retail operation, ecommerce, ERP and CRM applications come into this category – because if they’re not operating, neither is your business.

For this equipment, we’d recommend our 24x7x2-hour onsite SLA. Our Australian 24×7 call centre answers your call within seconds, then one of your assigned engineers calls you within 10 minutes.

Within two hours they’re on your premises, having stopped by one of our 81 ANZ parts depots where they have the authority to collect the genuine vendor part you’re likely to need. We provide a 100% local spare parts guarantee for all the hardware we’re contracted to maintain.

2. Non-critical systems

Many environments have business technology systems that are less time-critical. For example, equipment failure will only affect a small number of users or non-critical applications. Perhaps there are work arounds, or downtime will not cause major productivity losses or impact your customers for an unacceptable time.

When categorising this hardware in terms of required support levels, we have the opportunity to reduce your operational costs by offering a range of different SLAs. An appropriate response time might be 24x7x4-hours onsite – or even 9x5xnext business day. Whatever SLA you deem appropriate, you still get support from engineers that are familiar with your environment and people, and the same commitment to bringing required parts from a local depot. The benefit is a reduction in your overall support costs.

3. Length of Service

Every business has a cohort of trusty legacy systems that do a particular job. They might be up for replacement or migration to the cloud one day but, in the meantime, you need them to keep operating the way they always have. Hardware assets in this category might be approaching end of life – or even going beyond it – but that doesn’t mean you want (or need) to invest capital in replacing them right now.

Once we’ve identified the hardware supporting these systems, we can enable you to keep them operational, even after the vendor has declared ‘end of service life’ or EOSL. Again, you can choose from different service level agreements, and even to pay for support on a monthly rather than an annual basis.

Because we don’t sell equipment – just keep it running the way you need it to for as long as you want – we never declare end of life. This can not only save you from paying for costly support levels; it can also save you from investing in new equipment before you’re ready to. When you are ready to retire redundant equipment, we can then dispose of or recycle it for you ethically and securely.

We are dedicated to hardware maintenance

Hardware maintenance is what we’ve been doing since 1988. We have become Australia’s largest provider in this category – with over 2,500 customers currently under contract. Our first call resolution of 96% has set an industry standard that others can only aspire to.

With deep experience of helping our customers minimise downtime due to hardware failure, we can tailor a maintenance support plan across your hardware fleet. If you’d like to understand how we could reduce your operational ICT costs, talk to our hardware maintenance experts.