Office downsizing requires a complete overhaul to a company’s work environment, including your IT. Even though it requires extensive planning before making the move and causes significant disruption, a lot of business leaders are considering downsizing to save costs and future-proof the company. So, how can an IT manager help with downsizing when just moving office already requires significant planning and logistics on their part?
Why are businesses looking to downsize?
With so many staff working from home, and this is unlikely to change even post-pandemic, companies are reviewing the role the office plays in their business. Thanks to modern technologies, having one place where the whole company can gather is no longer needed to work collaboratively, and downsizing the office is presenting a valuable opportunity to business leaders:
- Fewer people in the office means reducing square footage to reduce costs
- People commuting less allows the office to move to less central and less expensive areas
- Infrequent trips into an office has the potential to attract talent from a broader geographical area
- The Covid-19 pandemic has hit the economy so businesses are looking to control costs and deploy savings to other income-generating areas
Reducing the costs attached to running an office increases a company’s flexibility into the future, but that doesn’t make it a straightforward process. An office move is never easy, but moving to a new office with less space makes it even trickier, and while every department will play a role in contributing to the space reduction, the impact on the IT team is significant.
Why do IT managers play a crucial role when downsizing?
IT managers already have a lot of responsibility and hassle when moving office to make sure equipment is moved across safely and ready to be switched on again quickly once the new office is up and running. Adding to the complication of trying to reduce IT space at the same time might seem daunting, but it’s actually a fantastic opportunity to help the company with the downsize and make the life of the IT department easier in this move and all future moves.
Quick fixes for IT managers when downsizing the office
There are several practical solutions IT managers can put into place which will make the downsize smoother and make moving office easier for the IT technicians; the very definition of two birds, one stone.
1. Making your hardware more efficient
This is particularly effective if your servers are a few years old. Upgrading to denser and more efficient CPUs and GPUs will mean that your hardware can compute as much as your current system (and potentially more) while taking up less floor space. This reduces the space it will take up in the new office and reduces how much you need to take with you in the move.
2. Go paperless
Any department in your company still using paper definitely has a digital solution that could replace it, help them find this digital solution and handle the deployment of it so that paper can be phased out of your business. This reduces the size of desks needed in the new office and gets rid of any filing cabinets and printers, space you can then use for your server stacks.
3. Equip the business with laptops
Modern laptops have the computing and storage capacity needed for the average office worker, removing the need for clunky PCs. Business leaders might be worried about security, or the potential for disorganisation with files no longer being saved centrally, but you can put policies and programmes in place to overcome these issues. Demonstrating why laptops are a safe and flexible choice for your business is the first step to getting them rolled out.
Laptops reduce the desk space people need and facilitate more hot-desking in the new office which will lead to an efficient use of space. Additionally, staff are now responsible for transporting their personal equipment, and your IT department no longer has to move desktop computers, screens, laptops, and mice to the new office.
Look into Infrastructure Management Services to help with downsizing
In addition to the above, moving your IT to a managed infrastructure solution will get your servers completely out of the office, saving space and making office moves a lot simpler. At the same time your IT will have increased reliability and flexibility, thanks to the expertly designed infrastructure it is now hosted with.
Colocation is a service that allows you to host your existing servers into a data centre, continuing your existing applications and reducing downtime.
Cloud moves your IT into a purely digital space, meaning you’re no longer responsible for a lot of your hardware which will be handled by your supplier.
You could also deploy a Hybrid of the two, allowing you to keep legacy or business-critical systems on private hardware hosted in a data centre, which is connected to a cloud provision ready to provide flexible and scalable capacity.
If you want to get some insight into which managed infrastructure would be the best fit for your company get a free consultation with one of our infrastructure experts by getting in touch.
