Expanding Relationships Can Help Businesses Lower TCO And Improve Efficiency
Bryan Reusser
Posted On March 29, 2024
In an era of continuously changing business and technology environments, adaptability is key—but it can be challenging for midsize businesses to adopt new trends while staying in control of costs.
A 2023 Quadrant Strategies survey showed that 88% of midsize IT decision-makers have already adopted or soon plan to adopt a platform to drive their next-gen apps—but in reality many midsize businesses struggle to meet the necessary resource and budget requirements to accommodate those changes. Additionally, they may face challenges such as non-scalable systems, security risks and skill gaps, which can have significant impacts on their ability to leverage new opportunities while increasing profitability. These challenges and the perceived difficulty of integration can prevent midsize businesses from taking advantage of powerful modern technologies—such as enhanced protection, cloud computing, edge computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G.
The good news is that with the right strategies and partners, midsize businesses can identify opportunities for heightened efficiency and integrate new solutions to help minimize operational costs and total cost of ownership (TCO). As an example, Forrester’s Total Economic ImpactTM study of Lumen® DDoS Mitigation Solutions calculated quantified benefits for productivity improvements, cost savings and decreased penalties related to security breaches. For the composite group of customers, this included $1.4 million in savings over three years from legacy technology reduction and $481K from reduction in penalties and fines formerly paid for security breach events (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Realized ROI with Lumen DDoS Mitigation Services
To stay competitive and grow, midsize businesses need to invest in a future-forward mindset and proactive solutions—while also being able to carefully evaluate the options and risks involved. Let’s go into detail about some strategic ways to develop more efficient practices and how it can help lower TCO, plus an overview of potential outcomes for your business.
Four strategies to help lower your TCO
Midsize companies can focus on growth and minimizing costs by investing in tools and resources that help optimize efficiency. There are several strategic approaches to consider in pursuing this goal:
- Adopting cloud-based solutions: By moving your operations to the cloud, your midsize business can minimize IT costs and maximize agility with fast, flexible connectivity. Cloud-based solutions also offer scalability, allowing for easy operational expansion as your business grows.
- Investing in automation: Automation is a powerful tool to streamline operations and help save on costs. By automating repetitive or time-consuming tasks, you can free up your employees to focus on more strategic work, boosting productivity and efficiency. A recent Bain survey found that companies that lead in automation investment reduced costs via their automated processes by more than twice the amount as laggards (i.e., companies that invest less than 5% of their IT budget in automation).
- Implementing data analytics: Data analytics can help your business make more informed decisions and enhance your operations. In-depth data analysis from various sources is a vital component of identifying trends and can be used to optimize your business processes and help reduce costs.
- Partnering with other companies: By forming strategic partnerships with other companies, your midsize business can expand your portfolio of offerings and adapt to reach promising new markets. Partnerships may also be a useful way to share resources, helping reduce your own expenses and enhance your efficiency.
These four tactics can be extremely valuable once implemented, but strategizing and developing a detailed plan is a critical first step in working towards business improvement. That’s where Lumen comes in.
How Lumen can empower growing businesses
Partnering with Lumen has a variety of benefits for you to leverage, including our team of experts with decades of hands-on experience in designing, implementing and maintaining solutions. Lumen helps leading organizations optimize their IT investments by providing integrated solutions designed to streamline workflows, maximize ROI and boost productivity. This way, businesses are empowered to build long-term, sustainable strategies designed to help minimize expenses that may undermine profitability, defend against risks inherent in the business landscape and evolve organizational goals. To drive these points home, a 2023 IDC survey found that 31% of IT decision-makers surveyed said they had seen reduced operational costs from working with a service provider partner.
With Lumen, you partner with a global leader in providing network, cloud, edge, security, collaboration and communication solutions for midsize businesses. Just a few of the ways Lumen supports your business include:
- Incorporating the right level of new services to complement or supplant existing infrastructure with adaptable pricing models tailored to your business needs.
- Delivering efficient technology experiences through integrated network, edge, security, collaboration and managed services solutions.
- Maximizing ROI with new technology tools and resources across the Lumen portfolio, designed to help reduce costs and enhance efficiency.
- Eliminating the need for multiple vendors or managing disparate systems and solutions with Lumen as your single technology provider. We partner with industry leaders to bring you comprehensive solutions.
- Leveraging our services team to build, manage and support your network, systems and applications seamlessly.
In conclusion, midsize businesses can set their sights on minimizing costs and TCO by investing in modernized technology solutions and leveraging a partnership with Lumen—including our extensive tools, resources and expertise. Your productivity, efficiency and customer satisfaction are top priorities, and our team is here to help every step of the way.
Learn more about the services and solutions Lumen provides for midsized businesses.
This content is provided for informational purposes only and may require additional research and substantiation by the end user. In addition, the information is provided “as is” without any warranty or condition of any kind, either express or implied. Use of this information is at the end user’s own risk. Lumen does not warrant that the information will meet the end user’s requirements or that the implementation or usage of this information will result in the desired outcome of the end user. All third-party company and product or service names referenced in this article are for identification purposes only and do not imply endorsement or affiliation with Lumen.
