CIOs, optimize your IT costs! Smile, with 25 years of expertise, reveals 4 strategic levers to reduce digital ecosystem expenses.
In a context where IT budgets are under pressure, CIOs must balance performance, scalability, and cost control. With 25 years of expertise in developing, hosting, and maintaining digital platforms, Smile has identified four strategic levers to reduce the costs of your digital ecosystem while maintaining a high level of efficiency and innovation.
Optimizing your hosting infrastructure :
The first cost-saving lever focuses on your hosting infrastructure, through FinOps analysis and Cloud Cost Management optimization. This includes strategies such as using reserved instances, implementing auto-scaling to adjust consumption in real time, and eliminating inactive resources.
It’s also possible to adopt a hybrid hosting model—combining cloud and on-premise solutions—allowing you to keep certain workloads on-site and avoid excessive variable costs on platforms where usage patterns are less predictable.
Another area to explore is infrastructure pooling, with increased use of virtualization (VMware, Hyper-V) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) to optimize server usage.
Finally, a thorough audit of unused services and applications should be conducted in order to decommission or rationalize instances accordingly.
Optimizing software licenses and subscriptions :
Mapping out active licenses often uncovers surprises—such as underused software or legacy choices of proprietary tools that could be effectively replaced by open source alternatives. Maximizing the use of open source solutions, eliminating underutilized software, and renegotiating with vendors can significantly reduce costs without compromising functionality or quality.
It’s also worth conducting an inventory of SaaS tools to identify opportunities for consolidating or sharing subscriptions across teams or departments.
Automation & optimization of IT processes :
While DevOps practices and continuous integration/deployment pipelines (GitLab CI, Jenkins, Ansible, Terraform…) are becoming more widespread, many organizations still have room to improve and fully industrialize these processes. Automating environment provisioning through Infrastructure as Code (IaC) also contributes to this transformation by eliminating manual interventions.
By reducing manual operations, these tools and practices boost both productivity and growth, enabling faster responses to customer demands and improving time-to-market.
Another area for optimization is user support, which can be enhanced by automating responses to user requests through chatbots and self-service portals.
Incident detection and resolution can also be automated using proactive monitoring and AIOps tools like Datadog, Splunk, or ELK. These solutions help reduce the human workload, freeing up teams to focus on higher-value tasks.
A further automation lever lies in industrializing web production through solutions like site factories and no-code back offices. These reduce the need for technical intervention while empowering business and marketing teams to operate more efficiently.
Implementing a design system also streamlines UI development, while switching to Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) can significantly lower both total cost of ownership (TCO) and implementation costs. DXPs are feature-rich solutions that reduce ongoing maintenance costs while offering greater autonomy to marketing and communication teams. Typically available as PaaS solutions, they offer all-in-one subscription models that include cloud hosting—providing a complete, autonomous web platform and a consolidated view of your digital budget.
Selective outsourcing and CAPEX-to-OPEX transition
The final cost-saving lever involves a measured outsourcing strategy that leverages nearshore resources in Central Europe or North Africa, along with a shift from heavy capital investment (CAPEX) to an OPEX-based approach for both infrastructure and applications.
By implementing a Digital Factory and embracing Agile methodologies, including MVP development and continuous improvement, organizations can spread investments over time with an iterative and scalable development model. This ensures end-user priorities are met while increasing engagement and satisfaction.
What are the benefits of these approaches?
- Up to 30% savings on hosting and licensing costs
- Improved productivity and reduced human errors
- Increased flexibility through a mix of internal and nearshore resources
By combining these four levers, the IT department can significantly reduce costs while maintaining a high level of performance, agility, and quality of service.
Smile, your trusted partner for smart digital optimization
Smile supports you in analyzing and implementing these four strategic levers through its Digital Factory offering and expertise in Cloud & FinOps.
Need an audit or a tailored strategy?
Contact our experts now!
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Consultez notre publication : Digital Factory – Comment réduire vos dépenses OPEX de 30 %