Even though it is a basic economic fact that recessions happen once or twice in a decade, when the economy is in a good shape, like it was a couple of years ago, people, including IT managers, tend to forget that the summer will be over and hard times will come soon. On the other hand, recessions might be bad but the current one is certainly worse than many of the ones before. Actually, this is the worst recession since the Great Depression in the 1930s and even the most optimistically-minded managers have really serious reasons to fear and be cautious.

We can't say that the recession took us by surprise but certainly we didn't expect it to be that fierce. However, recession or no recession, life must go on and if a company wants to make it, there are many things which can't be skipped. So, no matter that IT budgets are tight, there are items a company can't save on. Here are the top 5 items our IT department will not sacrifice:

1,Network security and security in general. Being in the network security business themselves, we know that network security and security in general is paramount and no matter how hard the economic situation might be, this is not an item to save on because the price is too high. Certainly, we are not buying the most expensive solutions, even though they are incredibly great but we also do not make compromises with the quality either.

2,Going green. Going green is also an item we can't skip. Green technology saves money and now this benefit is more important than ever. So, if we buy new IT stuff, we definitely go for the green items.

3,Compliance. Regulations compliance is another item we can't afford to skip, unless we really want to go out of business (and we don't). So, when there are steps in this direction to be taken, we do them ? no way!

4,Training. Training is also important and even though our training budget has shrunk, we still try to keep our staff qualified.

5,Outsourcing. Outsourcing has been a successful strategy for our company at all times and now, when money issues start to surface, we are happy that outsourcing helps us cut cost with no sacrifice of quality.

In addition to the things we can't do without, there are many more things we had to skip. We are not exactly happy to stop doing these things but desperate times cry for desperate measures and since these activities are something we can do without we had to either quit them, or drastically reduce them:

1,No purchases of new hardware. Though it is not precise to say that we haven't bought a single piece of hardware in the last year, we have definitely cut hardware spendings. For the time being we do not plan to make major hardware purchases.

2,Capital expenditures. Capital expenditures are another budget item we had to drastically shrink. We had schedules projects but the current economic situation made us have second thoughts and now capital expenditures are on hold.

3,Software that is nice to have but we can do without it. Similarly to hardware and capital expenditures, some major software expenses had to be cut. Yes, there are many products, for instance accounting, HR, or ERP modules, which are great to have but we'll go for them when the economic outlook is less gloomy.

4,Standardization. You know that IT people generally hate when they have to deal with bureaucracy and standardization, so if there is an item, we are happy to skip, this is standardization. More or less we skipped all standardization-related activities except those, that are related to regulations compliance. Standardization is put on hold, especially if it requires investment or other resources.

5,No infrastructure upgrades. We are not exactly happy about this one but since there are more important items we can't skip, we had to significantly reduce the planned network upgrades. Some of the projects in this area are put on hold, while others are canceled.

It wasn't easy to decide what to skip and what to keep but when times are tough, it is not possible to pretend that everything is OK and go on as planned. We hope that we are right in our choices and time will show if we did wise choices or not.