How information governance helps reduce IT budgets

A volatile economy and massive disruptions to business models have many IT planners scrambling to allocate budget and keep up with the changes. At the…

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Mike Safar

July 16, 20203 minutes read

A volatile economy and massive disruptions to business models have many IT planners scrambling to allocate budget and keep up with the changes. At the same time, they’re also realizing that nominal procedures cannot assure productivity and stability when the entirety of the supply chain, customer interaction and even employee communications have been turned upside down.

Recently, McKinsey & Company published “A practical way for CIOs to manage IT costs through the COVID-19 crisis”, which focused on this theme. In particular, McKinsey suggested a set of steps to lower IT costs and shared some simpler items that many IT departments have already executed, as well as more drastic measures.

Now, six months into the pandemic, companies are still looking for cost savings. There are a number of opportunities that have a very high payoff, but for which the execution path is not immediately obvious. Here are three ways IT organizations can decrease hardware, storage and maintenance costs while increasing the value and governance of information:

  • Application de-commissioning and consolidation of data. Getting business-complete information—both structured and unstructured—onto fewer systems saves on software licensing, ongoing support, hardware, storage, and more. This is why more organizations are deploying at OpenText™ InfoArchive to consolidate legacy data from dozens of applications into a single platform.
  • Move as much data to the cloud as possible. It’s not immediately obvious how to move so much data, especially legacy data, to the cloud securely and efficiently. Many modern cloud applications, including OpenText applications, provide “hybrid” models to begin cloud migrations and can be fully hosted in the cloud as well. When they can’t, OpenText InfoArchive can provide a cloud-enabled platform for hosting the data while retaining the full context of the data.
  • Remove redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data. Many organizations are struggling to keep up with the scalability of their data, while not realizing that they may not need to keep as much of the data as they imagine. It’s finally time to take a hard look at the data you have, removing what you can by applying analytics to the data, classifying it, and then executing the records policy. What’s left can often be put into less expensive, cloud-based storage easily using content services from OpenText.

If you’d like to learn more detail, George Harot and I expanded on these topics in a recent OpenText™ webinar “Optimize your IT budget through information archiving and content services in the cloud.” In this 30-minute webinar, we share more insights from McKinsey as well more details on what’s possible with OpenText analytics, archiving, and content services applications.

If you’re ready to get started with the next steps for retiring out of date applications, you can also join our upcoming webinar at 11:00am EDT on July 29, 2020, to get ideas on how to get a project underway.

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Mike Safar avatar image

Mike Safar

Mike Safar leads product marketing for OpenText information governance products and serves as a subject matter expert on information governance solutions and best practices. Mike’s previous experience has been in product management and marketing of leading information governance products for over 25 years, starting with integrated document management, records systems, and most recently intelligent content analytics solutions. His past experience includes positions at Interwoven, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and PC DOCS Group.

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