How to Analyze and Leverage IT TCO

Often, when we think cost, we think price. But that’s only part of the story. Total cost of ownership (TCO) encompasses not just initial costs, but all the expenses associated with owning and supporting something over time. TCO is comprehensive, which makes it a far better indicator of total expenses than working with face-value prices alone. 

Calculating TCO can help you make better strategic decisions and find ways to do more with the IT you have. This blog explores the basics of analyzing your IT TCO and how to identify opportunities to create a more cost-efficient tech environment. 

Note: This blog assumes a basic understanding of how to calculate TCO — if you’re not sure how to calculate TCO, we recommend starting with the IT Professional’s Complete Guide to Calculating TCO.

Calculating TCO

To conduct a strong TCO analysis, you’ll need to start with the right figures and information. There are many ways to go about calculating IT TCO, and important elements like scope and time period can significantly change your analysis. Determining these elements at the start will help make sure your analysis shows you what you want to know.

1. Start with a Goal: What Do You Want to Know?

First, determine what you want to learn by calculating TCO. TCO can help you analyze things like:

• The ROI on a tool you purchased.
• How much your company has spent on legacy equipment over the years.
• How much your company is really spending on its IT assets as a whole. 
• Whether an alternative solution would cost less than your current one over time. 
• Whether it would be cheaper to bundle tools than use separate ones for different functions.

There are many uses for TCO. It’s a flexible but powerful metric that can help you analyze spending on many levels. Start by defining a goal to stay on track.

2. Set a Time Frame 

TCO calculations typically include the past and current costs associated with an item or group of items. However, you can also project future TCO costs, and you can add them together for a projected lifetime cost. 

• Past costs: How much has the tool or stack cost you so far? 
• Future costs: How much can you expect to pay for this tool over a specified period of time? 

Pro tip: Future TCO is often used in proposals to switch solutions.

• Past, present, and future: What is the lifetime value of a tool or stack over a defined time period? 

Pro tip: there are ways to calculate future costs that account for expected company growth, upgrades, end of life (EoL) costs, and even expected inflation. We’ve developed a calculator that has built-in formulas that account for these variables as well as many others — try it out to see how much your tools may cost you in the future. 

3. Determine Which Elements to Include

TCO can be calculated for a single tool or a suite of tools. You might also choose to compare the TCO of different toolsets. 

TCO calculations can even include things like support costs, equipment hosting costs, rollout costs, and more. Consider your goal when deciding which elements are appropriate to calculate.

Consider the following examples:

• Calculate the TCO of your directory: You could calculate the TCO of your on-premises directory to see how much it has cost your company to support and maintain, and how much you can expect to spend on its continued support and maintenance over the next five years. 

• Calculating the TCO of a solution suite: A company might want to know the total cost of owning and maintaining a security solution made up of several security tools.

• Using TCO to scope out cost savings. If the projected costs of your multi-factor authentication (MFA) tool seem high, you could compare it to the projected costs of a more robust alternative. An open directory, for example, may offer MFA as well as several other tools, like mobile device management (MDM), patch management, and single sign-on (SSO). In this comparison, you would compare the projected cost of the proposed alternative directory over the next five years with the projected costs of your current directory, MFA, MDM, patch management, and SSO tools. 

Analyzing Findings

Calculating IT TCO can help you make strategic decisions and improve your resource allocation. TCO-informed decisions can unlock:

• Immediate and long-term savings. Applying TCO figures to your existing tech reveals opportunities to cut, consolidate, and optimize.

• Clearer program planning. Understanding your IT TCO enables you to more accurately specify program milestones, KPIs, steps, and associated costs.
• Better company, IT department, and personal performance. Understanding IT TCO helps you improve your department’s resource allocation, streamline your infrastructure, and improve efficiency. Those wins are tangible proof points of your success in recommending and driving initiatives. 
• Better employee experience and retention. Using TCO to optimize your IT environment helps maximize your teams’ potential rather than mire them in setup and maintenance efforts.

When looking at your company’s TCO, look for the following indicators of areas that could be optimized.

1. Look for Redundancy

Calculating the TCO of your IT infrastructure can help you identify opportunities to consolidate tools without losing needed functionality, ultimately lowering costs. To identify redundancies, try the following exercise: 

1. Itemize your software and tooling. 
2. List the features and capabilities of each. 
3. Calculate the TCO of each, projecting it out for 3-5 years (use this spreadsheet for automatic calculations).
4. Highlight similar or duplicate features.
5. Highlight rarely used or unnecessary features. 
6. Determine whether you can consolidate duplicate features into a smaller stack or eliminate tools that provide little value.
7. Calculate potential savings by adding up the projected TCO of the tools you could eliminate. 

2. Look for High Costs 

TCO calculations also allow you to examine your highest costs, which can sometimes be reduced. To find areas where you might be overpaying, try the following exercises:

Look for the highest-cost items:

1. List out the items in your infrastructure.
2. Break them down by cost: note the number of licenses, amount of time spent on support, subscription tier, and other relevant expenses. 
3. Calculate the TCO of each line item — past and current data could be sufficient, but including 3-5 years projections would help delineate future savings. 
4. Highlight the highest-cost items in your infrastructure.
5. Look for ways to cancel, consolidate, or reduce spending on your most expensive items. For example, are you paying for unused licenses or premium features you don’t need? Are you paying for vendor support that your MSP or someone internal could handle? 
6. Quantify potential savings by adding up the projected TCO of any line items you can eliminate. 

Compare your highest-cost hardware to the TCO of a cloud alternative. Cloud-based infrastructure is almost always more cost-effective than legacy, as it eliminates recurring hosting, maintenance, and management costs for the equipment. 

1. List out the line items of your on-premises infrastructure.
2. Calculate the future TCO of each. Try projecting out at least 3-5 years to ensure you account for eventual equipment upgrades and maintenance your team will need to take on internally. 
3. Outline a cloud-based infrastructure alternative. 
4. Calculate the projected future TCO of the line items in your cloud-based alternative. 
5. Compare the projected TCO of the two options.

We conducted this exercise on a fictional company as an example — check it out in the TCO calculator. The Executive Dashboard – Projected TCO tab shows the projected savings the company would gain by switching to cloud-based infrastructure. 

3. Accompany TCO with Risk Calculations

While TCO calculates the costs of what it takes to acquire and maintain solutions, it doesn’t account for the risks each solution poses. For an even fuller picture of your environment, consider including risk factors in your analysis — especially when comparing two solutions. Sometimes, a solution that reduces risk may be worth a higher cost.

For example, organizations that house their own legacy infrastructure typically provide their own physical security, which may not amount to much when accounting purely for TCO. However, the typical office’s on-prem security system can’t compare to the security global cloud providers have in place. In this case, the risk factor of in-house cameras and door alarms is significantly higher than that of a global data center monitored by security staff, protected with least-privilege physical access, and built to withstand everything from floods to seismic activity. 

This difference in risk adds dimension to comparisons and proposals. Often, the risk factors of cloud solutions are notably lower than in-house risks, which can help build a case for moving to the cloud. 

4. Look for Areas to Consolidate by Combating Sprawl

IT sprawl is extremely common in organizations today — in fact, only 15% of SME employees need one or two accounts to do their jobs, while 43% need at least six. Sprawl is one of the biggest cost inefficiencies in many small and medium-sized organizations (SMEs), and IT consolidation is the best way to counteract it. 

IT sprawl is a natural side-effect of growth: the need to move quickly and adequately equip employees sends IT teams into ad hoc purchasing patterns to solve problems as they arise. However, short-term fixes can create long-term problems. Environments often become tool-heavy, which makes them cluttered and sluggish with complex integrations, roundabout processes, and too many vendors to manage. 

Predictably, more vendors and tools lead to higher direct costs. For example, paying for an MFA tool, SSO tool, and directory platform separately would typically cost more than paying for one solution that offers all three.

Tool sprawl also drives up indirect costs. More tools means more time and effort demanded of you and your team. The complexity, unstable integrations, and convoluted processes that result from a cluttered tool environment decrease efficiency and obfuscate reporting. 

Consolidating sprawl removes the excess while optimizing your existing architecture for better team efficiency, lower maintenance costs, and clearer data.

Consolidating tools lowers both direct and indirect costs incurred by sprawl. For one, meeting your needs with a few robust solutions will almost always be more cost-efficient than doing so with a series of point solutions. Even when the robust tool is more expensive than a more limited counterpart, the benefits it provides, combined with the point solutions it allows you to eliminate, usually mean it will have a lower TCO in the long run. 

Further, eliminating the overhead required to bounce from tool to tool in a crowded stack means significant time back for your team to work more strategically — which means better cost-efficiency for the business. It also means better visibility, more flexibility to make changes as needed, and a better experience for you, your admins, and your users.

Learn more about unifying your stack in our blog.

Calculate TCO Easily 

We know that most IT professionals aren’t mathematicians, so we took the tedious part out of the TCO calculation process with a TCO calculator tool. It’s a free spreadsheet template that can calculate costs, project future costs that account for growth, inflation, and EoL costs, and compare solutions based on your input. It even generates screenshot-worthy graphs and visuals that will push your next proposal over the edge. 

Try the TCO calculator →