Return on Investment
Traditionally, IT is seen as a cost center in most companies - during times of crisis, it is often the first place Chief Financial Officers look to make cuts. Proportionately, IT expenditures tend to receive larger cuts in terms of total budget over other business units. Oftentimes, the easiest place to show the most savings is to cut back on salaries - however, that results in the same amount of tasks divided up among a smaller staff of people, creating the risk of missing the next wave. IT executives need to look to do more with less, but with fewer physical resources rather than fewer people. Utilize MUSA to help identify areas where you can reuse your capital investments by consolidating, exploring alternative storage techniques, leveraging group licensing, using cloud computing and standardizing technology investments. Supplement your IT staff with our seasoned professionals to transition your department away from the impression that it is a cost center instead of a cost saver.
Historically, server workload was viewed as a one-to-one relationship. Each physical server was tasked with a specific function and rarely, if ever, reached its full computing potential, letting valuable resources go unused. Virtualization has changed the way we utilize our capital investments. Consolidating server workload can provide a seventy-five percent reduction in physical servers, yielding increased savings in hardware and software costs, reduced contracted support costs and a reduction in energy, cooling and facilities costs. In addition to the immediate cost savings, more historical savings will be realized. As your organization expands and grows, it will avoid purchasing more physical servers until the virtual infrastructure reaches its full computing capacity during peak usage. Even more long-term, additional data-center build-out will be avoided while still maintaining adequate space for growth. MUSA has several clients for whom we’ve transitioned their infrastructure from a physical environment to a virtual environment, streamlining and making better use of their computing resources to gain a significant return on investment year after year. Assuming a modest infrastructure environment of fifty servers consolidated down to thirteen in a virtual environment, in a one-thousand-user scenario, the cost savings over a single year could easily exceed $115,000 annually.
While you’re upgrading your server infrastructure to take advantage of the benefits that virtualization provides, it is often an excellent opportunity to examine the state of your enterprise-level databases. Transitioning legacy databases over to newer database server technologies featuring scaling and higher performance benchmarks can further consolidate your database servers, allowing you to spend less on licensing and helping you avoid the addition of more servers in the future. Return on investment could easily reach upwards of 150% and allow you to condense and optimize your data and downsize your database servers to utilize previously stagnant disk space. MUSA’s valued relationship with our first-in-class storage distributors will allow you to leverage competitive pricing to receive the lowest possible total cost of ownership in a tight economy and uncertain future.
Validated storage is the backbone of Pharmaceutical, Biomedical, Biotechnology and Medical Device companies, and you deserve a partner you can trust to update your infrastructure while remaining compliant with regulatory best practices.
Often times, organizations tend to overbuy licenses that go unused, purchase similar solutions from multiple vendors and fail to take advantage of group or enterprise pricing. These mistakes not only duplicate effort and reduce productivity, but can also waste valuable resources that could have been directed elsewhere. Forging a relationship with a distributor that can handle the majority of your hardware or software licensing requirements can yield significant savings as a valued customer association is fostered. MUSA has accounts with several of the leading names in software and will be pleased to pass the cost-savings that we receive from our distributors along to you, our clients. We’ll help you develop licensing best practices to ensure you’ll no longer be purchasing unneeded or duplicate solutions at or above retail pricing. Furthermore, our history of providing superior service to companies within the Life Sciences industry has given us the expertise and familiarity with much of the laboratory, research and development, and cGMP applications that your business group uses on a daily basis. For a one-thousand-user organization, your cost-saving potential could reach in excess of 30%.
Cloud computing - accessing storage, data and applications off-site and over the internet - has started to gain acceptance in enterprise-level Information Technology. Private cloud services have become commonplace, but very few companies within the Life Sciences industry have been able to realize the cost-saving benefits in terms of infrastructure, storage, application and support costs due to the lack of regulatory and compliance controls available. MUSA’s long history of servicing the technology needs of Pharmaceutical, Biomedical, Biotechnology and Medical Device companies has given us the necessary expertise in deploying qualified environments, and now we’re offering those services available in the cloud. The MUSA Validated Cloud is an industry-first FDA 21 CFR Part 11 and 820, GxP and Quality System Compliant cloud infrastructure specifically designed to meet the scientific, business and technology needs of Scientists, Quality Assurance Managers, Information Technology Executives and Business Owners alike. You’ll have the applications you require, but at fraction of the cost. We’ve already gone through negotiations with application providers to bring our clients significantly discounted pricing coupled with audited and pre-written GxP documentation.
Creating a standardization policy regarding IT investments can dramatically reduce costs across functional areas. Business units tend not to communicate effectively, but if one policy regarding all investments is written, it can simplify the IT decision-making process. In Pharmaceutical and other Life Science companies where multiple products are being developed requiring applications for research and development, manufacturing and quality assurance, there are at least six different departments listed in this scenario alone. Application purchases, physical server acquisition, validated storage and cloud services might easily be duplicated unnecessarily – instead, applications should have been reused or purchased with group pricing, existing virtualized servers should have been utilized, validated storage should have been optimized to avoid further build-out and existing cloud service subscriptions should have been leveraged. MUSA has years of experience in all of these areas and can facilitate cross-functional communication and manage your projects through the entire life cycle to make certain that your investments are being leveraged to their full potential. Enjoy the freedom of less duplication of effort - with the help of MUSA, you can further transition your department into a cost saver and company asset.
