Tough Times

It's no surprise to anyone, every IT department is going along with rest of the world in having to deal with smaller budgets, cost cutting, and everything that goes along with a really tough economy. We're all treading new water every day with new lows and new surprises in the market.

For the typical IT administrator, the key here is how to reduce your costs in an effort to be the good corporate citizen. Proxies should be on your shortlist on how to help you cost cut in your organization. If you're already using a proxy today to restrict usage of the Internet, re-evaluate your policies and make sure they're up to date for today's social networking, Web 2.0 web use. If you don't have a proxy, you need to get one to make sure you aren't increasing your bandwidth spend every quarter due to unauthorized use of the internet. In other words, don't increase your bandwidth budget to pay for someone watching video on your corporate bandwidth links.

Some proxies offer even greater savings than just internet policy enforcement. Many offer compression, caching and other bandwidth savings features as well, and there's even a proxy out there that doubles as a WAN Optimization device, saving bandwidth across those wide area links. Do your homework and find out if a proxy can help you cut costs in today's frugal environment