Is Your 5-Year-Old Computer Costing You a Fortune?

How long has your workstation been in use? How long does it take to boot up, to access your user profile, to load the documents you need to work on?

It can be extremely tempting to put off any investment into new hardware… after all, it still works, doesn’t it? Well, depending on your answers to the above questions, it might not. Don’t fall into the classic trap of relying on hardware that is simply too old to support your needs. It’s more expensive than you’d think.

Three Ways Old Hardware Costs You More Than You’d Expect

It is too easy to stop counting the cost of your hardware once it has been purchased. While any hardware purchase is going to require a bit of upfront investment, your older devices are likely costing you in other ways.

Productivity Costs

It can be too easy to exclusively focus on downtime as a metric of success, forgetting that there are more options than “it works” or “it doesn’t.” There are also all the delays that slow equipment causes that fall within that range. All of those delays, each and every minute of them, wind up costing you money.

“So what,” you may think, “It’s just a few seconds.”  Well, let’s see if you feel the same way after we add those seconds up.

Let’s estimate that the average employee winds up waiting about 10 minutes each day for their technology to catch up… not great, but it still doesn’t seem unreasonable. However, at the end of a year, this wait time has cost an employee a total of 42 hours… basically a full workweek.

Now, multiply that 42 hours by the number of employees you have. Chances are, you’re looking at more wasted time (and by extension, money) than you would have thought a bit of slow, old tech could have caused.

Security Costs

Each outdated piece of hardware you’re clinging to is a gift to a hacker, simply because they don’t have to work as hard. The older your hardware is, the less likely it is to support the protections that software developers add to operating systems and software. At some point, it simply won’t be… which means the very tools you work with could be the thing that leaves the doors open for greater threats.

In this way, it’s important to keep an eye on your business’ infrastructure and address these aging pieces of hardware before they allow in some form of malware or other vulnerability.

Inconvenience Costs

Finally, there are the financial impacts that are suddenly applied whenever your hardware happens to give up the ghost and go kaput. For instance, what happens when you’re halfway through a major project, up against an equally major deadline? The costs you’re forced to accept to avoid incurring even more are still far more than any business wants to spend and far more than the costs of planning and implementing a controlled update.

Ultimately, It’s Better to Strategically Upgrade than Scramble Amidst Emergencies

It can be easy to initially see holding on to old hardware as an economic choice. However, it is, in reality, far too high-risk to be seen as anything other than a guarantee of lost security and productivity. So, what can you do to avoid this outcome?

Simple: you need to enact a hardware lifecycle plan that is founded in strategy—and ideally managed by a loyal and professional partner like our team at Heart of Texas Network Consultants—to more successfully ensure peak performance while remaining predictable in your budget.

Let’s get started creating a plan for you. Give us a call at (254) 848-7100 to learn more.