The cost of doing business has never been higher for modern enterprises. And while no company can entirely avoid paying these costs, CIOs and CTOs play a vital role in reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the technology. This blog post provides an overview of three ways in which IT leaders can reduce TCO in their organizations in 2023. Businesses can save money on technology costs by automating processes, improving efficiency and looking for cost-effective cloud solutions.Â
What is TCO
TCO is the cost of services and products combined with daily operations for both physical and cloud resources. TCO is used to aid decision-making by analyzing the cost-reward ratio for projects and company initiatives. For example, many organizations have mandates to move most of their workloads to the cloud. So, generally they need to calculate the migration and operational cost to determine the feasibility of the move.
Reducing the cost of doing business is essential for any organization focused on increasing profitability, and it’s especially important for technology-based businesses. CIOs/CTOs are tasked with defining processes that reduce TCO and ultimately save money. Here are three ways in which they can reduce TCO in 2023.
Automation
Automating repetitive tasks is one proven way to save money. Modern businesses are becoming increasingly data- and application-driven. Outages of mission-critical applications have catastrophic consequences. Automation helps reduce the risk of such outages, reduces costs and also frees up resources to allow developers and IT teams to work on more revenue-generating tasks.
Automation also speeds up application development and deployment. For example, automating data pipelines improves efficiency tremendously, which is also a cost driver. For this reason, many organizations have significantly enhanced their DevOps capabilities and have benefitted from the resulting reduction in TCO.
Improving process efficiency
By improving process efficiency, TCO can be greatly reduced. This can be accomplished through a variety of methods, such as reducing the number of steps in a process, automating tasks and improving communication between departments. By encouraging inter-department collaboration, IT leaders can help their organizations achieve cost-reduction goals while maintaining high-quality standards.
Organizations are improving efficiency by examining existing processes, reducing duplication and incorporating more effective modern alternatives such as cloud migration, which is discussed below. Employing evidence-based decision-making also helps efficiency by clearly determining value-adding tasks and bottlenecks. Taking these analytical steps help companies create more optimal but less expensive processes and reduce waste. Once better practices are identified, communicating with stakeholders and employing good change management empower implementation.
Cloud Migration
By moving workloads from on-premises to the cloud, enterprises outsource some of their most time-consuming IT management and maintenance activities. This frees up IT teams to concentrate on revenue-generating activities like developing features, fixes and new innovations to enhance the customer experience and gain an edge over competitors. Migrating to the cloud improves agility, lowers TCO and accelerates innovation using cloud native development and automation technologies.
For example, when deciding to move to a database platform on the cloud, factors such as performance, flexibility and efficiency should be heavily considered. Many organizations choose to migrate from traditional RDBMS (relational database management systems) to NoSQL platforms to gain better data flexibility, increased ability to quickly update applications as requirements change, and of course much better scalability.
Conclusion
With more and more enterprises looking to cut costs and streamline tech stacks, they should consider Couchbase’s NoSQL database, which provides benefits, such as:
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- Industry-leading performance demonstrated by independent benchmarks that compare database throughput and latency for various workloads.Â
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- Multimodel data access with services such as analytics, eventing, mobile application services and FTS (full-text search)
- Multidimensional scaling (MDS) to enable matching the architecture to the workload
Next steps
 Learn more about Couchbase Capella:
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- Take Capella for a test drive by signing up for a free 30-day trial
- Connect your trial cluster to the Playground or connect a project to test it out for yourself.
- Visit the Couchbase Developer Portal, which has tons of tutorials/quickstart guides and learning paths to help you get started.
- See the documentation to learn more about the Couchbase SDKs
If you have any questions or comments, please connect with us on the Couchbase Forums!