Shah said enterprises should lock in pricing too. “Companies should secure multiyear pricing for the computing capacity they know they will need,” he said. Moving workloads to the cloud will not avoid rising hardware and energy costs “because providers will pass them on,” he added.

Which refreshes to delay

When it comes to replacing existing equipment, Shah said, the right call depends on the workload. “For general back-office PCs and routine file servers, stretching lifecycles from three years to five is harmless,” he said. “But for core infrastructure and engineering seats, delaying refreshes can backfire.” Aging equipment can drag on productivity, lose software support and fail more often, he added.

Shah also cautioned against turning to older memory to save money. Memory makers have been converting production lines to high-bandwidth memory and DDR5, so DDR4 is no longer cheap or plentiful, he said. “If you buy legacy platforms today to shave 10% off upfront server costs, you’re buying into systems which won’t have serviceable parts two years from now.”