In tough economic times we all have to watch where we spend money and how we spend it. We can’t let bad financial times or the threat of what may happen keep us from spending what we need to spend to ensure that our data is secure. We can’t be stupid and spend just for the sake of spending, but we also can’t not spend just to save money. Sometimes money has to be spent now to keep from spending more later.
I remember several years ago there was a commercial for Pennzoil with Arnold Palmer. The key line was “You can pay now or you can pay later”. It was in reference to spending a little now to change your oil regularly or pay a lot later when you have to have major repairs. I also saw something today that made me think about this. There is a water line break in Atlanta near my office. It’s been there for about 2 or 3 weeks. You can see where the water is seeping through the asphalt and it’s creating a nice little river flowing down a side road. Of course it’s frozen a time or two and probably will tonight since it’s supposed to get down to the upper 20’s tonight. I assume that it’s not being fixed because of the budget crunch that the city of Atlanta is in but the problem is that soon it’s going to cause a sink hole and cost a lot more to repair. Not to mention it’s going to create a traffic nightmare at a busy intersection and possibly cause injury to someone if they happen to be driving over that spot when it decides to collapse. So in an effort to save a couple of thousand dollars the city will probably end up spending 30 or 40 thousand, wasting lots of water and possible cause someone to get hurt. Of course if that happens then there will be a multi million dollar law suit.
Now that we are in a new year and are looking forward to what we will be able to do and those things that we won’t be able to do we have to plan on selling the really important things more than ever. We need to start now in building our case to management on why we can’t delay certain things. We also need to be prepared to go to them with our list of “sacrificial lambs”. Things that we had planned on doing but are not as important as the “gotta haves”. By doing this we show them a couple of things. One, that what we are keeping is really important and two, that we are willing to make sacrifices in order to get the really necessary things.
