October 5, 2020

Last Updated on January 12, 2024

These days many of us are fighting the same battle—figuring out how to do more with less, keep the lights on and position our business for success as the economy recovers.
The hard part in all that is “doing more.” Making reactive cuts can save money now, but it might also reduce your effectiveness and slow your forward progress when business picks up.

Where can you find some fresh, real-world ideas to cut expenses without cutting essential capability?

That’s the question that we put to special guest Jose Ciriaco on The Virtual CISO Podcast. Jose is Director of Sales and Marketing at Tekscape, a leading Manhattan-based MSP.
Jose is in the trenches every day helping clients find new ways to save money on IT and cybersecurity. Episode host John Verry, Pivot Point Security’s CISO and Managing Partner, also has years of experience helping SMBs make the smartest possible technology investments in every business climate. When these two experts put their heads together, uniquely valuable insights are the result.

Consolidation is a basic cost-saving strategy.

But as Jose points out, you need to approach it systematically: “So, gathering all the services that you say you need as a business within the area of IT and going down the line and scrutinizing everything. … But from a technology perspective, you have to have a lot of planning involved. So you have to know what your end state is going to look like. You can’t just arbitrarily start cutting services because you deem them nonessential in the now.”
“For instance, we have a customer right now and we’re working on a datacenter consolidation project for them,” Jose continues. “It’s effectively getting rid of a footprint. But they slowly discovered as we’re doing the planning that some of the services that they have there are more necessary than they ever expected.”

“There’s no fast way to rip off the Band-Aid…

…you have to really take the time to plan out where you’re going to have services live and shrink the footprint as best you can,” stresses Jose. “It’s really about finding efficiencies and lowering the overall spend through those efficiencies.”
A core element of this kind of strategic consolidation is vendor consolidation. Yes, you want to avoid the risk of “putting all your eggs in one basket.” Instead, look for ways to leverage the strengths of your best vendor relationships to drive more savings to the bottom line. Remember, your vendors want you to be happy!
If your company needs to strategically reduce IT/cybersecurity spend, you don’t want to miss this episode of The Virtual CISO Podcast featuring Jose Ciriaco.
To listen to the episode with Jose in its entirety, and browse all the other episodes in The Virtual CISO Podcast series, click here.
If you’d rather not use Apple Podcasts, you’ll find all the episodes here.