Bangalore: With tighter IT budgets there are numerous things SMB can no longer ignore in terms of IT investments and plans. In today’s IT Environment trends like BYOD are on the rise and basic technologies like data backup and document management may not appear as immediate priorities but, if ignored, can have long-term financial impact.

"The highly distributed nature of these Internet-connected devices and diversity of these devices, in terms of the hardware or operating systems, drive up management and maintenance costs and can impact productivity and increase security risks if not properly integrated," said Bastiaan Toeset, director of partner-led sales in Asia-Pacific, Japan and Greater China at Cisco Systems reports Kevin Kwang of ZDNET.

Here are some top IT hidden cost areas and tips offered by Toeset on how SMBs can avoid the unnecessary financial baggage.

#1 Use tech wisely

IT has become an integral part of every organization today, be it small, medium, or large. The difficulty lies in understanding how technology can be put to effective use. Lim Kok Hin, vice president and COO at Canon Singapore said that SMBs should use tech to leverage their key advantages of agility and adaptability, thus, lowering IT expenditure.

Shivanu Shukla, co-founder of Teamie, a startup briefed about how his company is using technology like cloud computing to reduce IT costs. "Cloud services are typically very transparent with their pricing," he explained. "The hidden costs are more a function of how well the company plans its IT resources versus its needs. For example, if you planned to reserve two large EC2 instances, but realize you need three or four instances, then your IT budget will begin to balloon."

According to Shukla cloud computing gives Teamie the flexibility to grow its business and scale its IT resources accordingly.