Investing in new IT equipment can represent a significant financial outlay given the scale of the necessary upgrade. However, making this choice regularly is, in many respects, one of the best options. Why? What are the advantages for a company to regularly change its IT infrastructure? What equipment should be renewed and at what pace should this upgrade be carried out? What are the best options for managing the renewal of your business IT equipment and truly equipping yourself according to your needs? Focus.
Upgrading Your Business IT Equipment: Why Do It Regularly?
Ending the loss of productive time is one of the major challenges for most businesses. Do your employees regularly complain about equipment malfunctions and experience disruptions due to outdated IT systems? Review all the reasons to upgrade your IT infrastructure.
Increased Productivity
Various elements of an IT infrastructure require regular maintenance and renewal. While this is obviously true for workstations, some more discreet but equally essential equipment must also be renewed to adapt to the entire structure.
This applies to the cabling or wireless connectivity that links your computers to your other IT equipment. However, technology in this area is constantly evolving. It is therefore not uncommon for it to hinder the structure of an IT network due to its age, despite a recent change in IT equipment.
Specifically, worn or obsolete cables slow down the transmission of information between workstations. To address this issue, it is therefore essential to regularly update your IT infrastructure and not neglect cabling and peripherals, which truly impact your teams’ productivity.
Time and Performance Gains
Regularly upgrading your hardware is crucial because constant technological evolution allows new equipment to improve performance. With newer hardware, you can complete a task three times faster than with older hardware.
Financial Gain
Moreover, while team productivity has everything to gain from the regular renewal of your IT equipment, so does your IT budget. Indeed, outdated IT equipment proves costly in terms of maintenance, repair, or troubleshooting.
Furthermore, an old IT infrastructure is more vulnerable to cyberattacks, which are costly in terms of time, intervention budget, and brand image.
Performance, comfort, security, and budget gains are therefore the main advantages of regularly upgrading your IT equipment.
Upgrading Your IT Equipment: What Does It Involve for Your Company?
Upgrading your IT equipment goes beyond replacing obsolete computers. Printers, landline phones, servers, and firewalls all have a crucial impact on the functionality of your IT infrastructure. Too often, however, these devices offer insufficient performance, which then harms the productivity of very small businesses and SMEs.
What IT Equipment Should Be Regularly Replaced in a Company?
As mentioned above, a company’s entire IT infrastructure must be regularly renewed to standardize the structure. However, depending on the company, it may be relevant to carry out a rolling upgrade, according to job profiles. In any case, all hardware and software resources that make up your IT system must be renewed. This concerns:
- Fixed workstations, including central processing units, as well as screens, mice, or keyboards…
- Mobile devices: laptops, smartphones, and tablets.
- Peripherals: printers, scanners, microphones, cameras, hard drives…
- Network tools and IT data storage tools: routers, switches, Wi-Fi hotspots, modems, firewalls, servers, NAS…
- All operating systems, software, and applications (antivirus, software solutions…).
When to Upgrade Your Business IT Equipment?
The question of how often to change IT equipment often arises. However, the answer is not so complex if you rely on the typical lifecycle of each device. Thus, to determine when to change your company’s IT equipment, here are the recommended timeframes:
- 5 years for a desktop PC or server
- 3 years for a laptop
- 7 years for a LAN or Wi-Fi network
- 5 years for a Firewall
What are the risks once these periods have passed? You risk:
- experiencing decreased performance and an increased likelihood of hardware failures.
- no longer benefiting from your equipment warranties
It is therefore strongly advised to follow these recommendations to optimize the functioning of your IT infrastructure.
Furthermore, signs will guide the necessity of this renewal. Indeed, latency times increase, slowing down task execution, and the maintenance you need to perform on your peripherals multiplies. Then, obsolescence gradually renders your peripherals unusable.
All these situations should lead you to anticipate an upgrade of your IT equipment.
The Best Options for Managing and Upgrading Your IT Equipment
IT Asset Management can be handled in different ways:
- internally, via your Chief Information Officer (CIO) or via your IT manager.
- by an external provider, most often an IT managed services company.
In any case, if you prefer internal management, be sure to entrust this task to an IT expert. This will minimize the risks of breakdowns or business interruptions.
Conversely, if you prefer to outsource the management of your IT infrastructure, be sure to inquire with IT managed services providers to ensure they can manage your entire IT system.
Xbline IT experts are responsible for:
- inventory and mapping of the information system
- definition of job profiles
- providing advice on IT infrastructure optimization based on your activity.
Furthermore, they also offer you the equipment adapted to your needs (thanks to their partnerships with various suppliers), handle the renewal and installation of equipment, and the recycling of your old devices (via their partner associations). Then, if necessary, Xbline offers preventive maintenance services or technical assistance for your users…