IT spending can quickly get out of control—and neither executives nor their in-house and/or outsourced IT professionals necessarily know where to cut costs.

First of all, stop buying the most storage money can buy. Sure, at home you may want all of those photos and movies, but it is unlikely your workers will need to have such a large expensive hard drive. Of course, these days, nobody should be buying “hard drives” with spinning drives except for servers. Everything for users now employs SSD Solid State Drives that are basically a lot of memory chips. They are faster, more durable, and usually last longer. And, you can spend (waste) a lot of money very quickly by purchasing larger drives. Stop that. 256G is probably more than enough drive space. You may even get away with less. And what if your organization uses CAD or Video files? Ok, you may be an exception, or you may be able to store those big files on your file servers or even “in the cloud” to free up space on your computers.

Second, just like with about everything else, stop paying for extended warranties. Paying for “on site emergency responses” may be important in some circumstances where equipment is mission critical. Just be sure the risks are high enough to justify the cost of the warranties.

Third, stop paying for bandwidth you don’t need. It seems like the large carriers are always offering a “special deal” to upgrade to their “new faster service.” It is a good idea to “shop around” every 12 months or so to find out the lowest going rate. Additionally, unless the price is the same, there is no need to pay for a 100Mbps connection to the Internet when you never exceed 30Mbps of traffic.

Fourth, use the power of the IT hardware and applications that you have already invested in! Most of you already own hardware and applications that can perform more functions than you’ll ever need. Most everyone wants to find happiness in life by getting rid of old frustrating technology. That sometimes makes us over-eager to adopt the “latest and greatest” solution that we decide “will finally make all our problems go away.” Often, executives and even IT Professionals have unreasonable expectations of what technology can solve. It is often better to utilize what you already invested in.

Next week, expect part 2 of this topic about saving money in IT.