Tough times make you think hard about what you still can accomplish with fewer resources. But what about the resources you have yet to tap into?

When it comes to IT, there are a multitude of low-cost and free resources available. The question is, which ones are worth considering? What low-cost resources will not only save you money in the short term, but also are reliable, proven and secure enough to not introduce long-term pain in the process? This article dives into practical examples that you can start using today, to save dollars and look like a hero in the process.

For the past 10 years, many technologies that we have been using reached wide-scale adoption and thus essentially have become commoditized. It’s baffling how many companies continue to invest large amounts of dollars to pay for technologies that have reached mainstream status. These technologies aren’t necessarily giving companies a competitive advantage anymore. They are simply there to help run the business. In these cases, consider a few options to cut costs by using proven low-cost or free solutions.

Open Source Software – Community-Driven Solutions

Commoditized software often comes in the form of open source technology projects. Now, I’m not saying all open source projects are commoditized technologies, but many OSS projects spring up because a group of talented developers are tired of paying for a set of services that would be relatively easy to recreate.

Good open source projects have strong communities behind them, and in some cases, build better features and offer better support than the commoditized technologies they originally set out to reproduce. The key to picking an open source project is not by the product’s current features, but by the strength and viability of the community behind it. The community can be measured by the speed of innovation (i.e., how quickly product releases reach shippable status), the support forums (i.e., how mature and active the discussion forums are), and the number of active installations currently in production environments. If support, service and commercial product businesses have been built around open source solutions, you can feel that much more comfortable that the project’s got some legs and is going to be around for the foreseeable future.

Software-as-a-Service Gaining Momentum

Other commoditized software has morphed into a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. New and existing vendors are packaging solutions that don’t come with a sticker price, but instead, a subscription fee reserved for the individuals that need to use them. Many of these solutions have free programs available for a limited number of users (great for SMBs) or with limited feature sets which, in some cases, are all that a company needs.

It’s even more important to analyze the viability of SaaS vendors, since the technologies are relatively closed in comparison to open source solutions. While evaluating SaaS solutions, it’s important to understand a vendor’s funding/cash position, subscription base and the openness of their platform, in case you want to migrate to a different solution at a later date. This table compares and ranks some attributes of the three models.

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