Crisis Survival Kit: 5 Ways IT Can Save MoneyCrisis Survival Kit: 5 Ways IT Can Save Money

Monitor employees' Internet activity to limit excessive nonwork usage and reduce the need for additional bandwidth expenditures. "You see these studies about how much time people say they claim to spend on the Internet," Sfakiyanudis explained to me, "and 28 percent of it is surfing! We look at one of their biggest expense is, and it's payroll." Sfakiyanudis said that if employers can get 10 percent of productivity back through Internet monitoring, that's a significant savings. And regarding the bandwidth issue, Sfakiyanudis pointed out that while people tend to have the same Internet speeds at work as at home, at work they're sharing the Internet with 30, 50, 100 other people, affecting work-critical applications.

Automate manual network documentation and other time-consuming tasks. "You have guests come in and hook up laptops, people coming and going," said Sfakiyanudis. "Look at network traffic so that you can automate connections. Automate something that currently takes bodies and time to accomplish."

Add employee identity to network documentation to enable faster problem resolution by the help desk. IT faces a big challenge, Sfakiyanudis said. Everything that's set up for security and virus protection has alerts that provide IP addresses for an offending machine, but they're often anonymous. So IT has to trace that information, which is time wasted just because there is no automated identity, he said.

Document Internet usage to reduce liability associated with personnel actions. Sfakiyanudis said he's often heard of work stories in which one employee complains about another surfing pornographic sites on the Internet. Yet when the IT staff gets backup support for the alleged activity, there's often no way to prove how long an employee was on a particular site or whether it was accidental. Therefore, it's very difficult to build a case against the employee. "Being able to document the time spent and where is really critical to avoiding liability for firing someone based on someone else's word," said Sfakiyanudis.

Enforce green policies to reduce energy tasks. Sfakiyanudis recommended generating reports that state which equipment is being left on all night. He said you'd be surprised how many employees are unaware that they leave their computers all night long with streaming radio sucking up bandwidth.