With IT hardware not likely to decrease in price anytime soon, we wanted to explain all the factors that may currently be affecting your IT bill within your organisation.  This may hopefully help you to understand the areas where you can have an affect and the areas where you and your MSP can’t affect your IT bill.  To help us begin, we’ve included all the main factors on your IT expenses in the figure below.

In a previous blog we covered the worldwide chip shortage, which you can read here.  Unfortunately, we are still seeing the affects of this in not just the IT world, but even the car industry!  As more and more of the items in our lives involve a computer of any kind they require chips, so until the supply can catch up with demand stocks will deplete quickly for some items.  It’s always worth getting in touch with your MSP as soon as you know you have a requirement to allow them to plan and advise on current stock levels.  This also leads onto the low supply, high demand factor.  When demand is high for any product and supply low the price will trend upwards until either demand decreases or supply increases.

The ever-present threat of cyber-attacks means that the costs required to protect your IT are increasing as more advanced and additional layers are required to protect you and your business.  Your MSP is also increasing their security measures and their insurance costs is increasing as more high-profile cyber-attacks take place and further test the conditions of insurance policies.  We are also recommending that our clients look to invest in their own cyber security insurance as the threat of cyber-attack continues to increase.

While our software develops and is now able to do so much more for us than previous versions, as it gets more advanced so does it’s minimum spec of hardware.  This in turn means that when you are looking to invest in IT hardware, the higher the spec the higher the cost which will also contribute to increasing IT costs.  On top of this, all industries are affected by the transportation and logistics issues which has increased delivery costs of your IT hardware.

The IT industry is facing a skills shortage in the UK, which is the same for many industries right now.  But this does mean that to be able to staff and provide our clients with high quality and efficient IT support that labour costs are increasing and with demand for IT professionals high and supply low, the labour rate is higher.  As you can see through this article, there are a few issues that we are all facing no matter what industry we are in and we are all feeling the affect of this.  Here at MJD, we want to make your IT work for YOU, so if you feel your current costs are increasing beyond a point you can manage with your current IT provider or if you don’t currently have IT support, we are here to help.  We have a variety of support models, designed to suit all sizes of businesses and the team here at MJD are always happy to discuss your individual requirements.