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Sustainable IT

It's fair to say that cost saving is fairly high on the list for most companies, but saving costs and reducing your company's impact on the environment surely ticks 2 boxes!

Gartner recently reported that ICT departments account for 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions, which is roughly the equivalent of what the airline industry produces. As a result, Gartner believes that IT is going to come under increasing pressure to change its conduct, and particularly to reduce its power consumption.

The Green movement appears in everyday lives as well as business. In business however, the impact on the environment is not as controllable as what they would be at home; today many businesses adopt a cycling to work scheme, or a lift share scheme, have recycling bins in the office for waste paper and cardboard and use video conferencing more often to avoid travelling to meetings etc. All of which are useful, but only touch the surface, the ICT departments can have a huge impact on reducing the company's carbon footprint.

There are 4 key areas that the Information Communication Technology department to focus on to reduce the company's environmental impact:

  1. Environmentally Efficient ICT
  2. Environmentally Intelligent ICT
  3. Transformational ICT Services
  4. Green ICT Supply

A combination of these factors can really add up to make a significant impact.

Environmentally Efficient ICT
Today many products are designed to be energy efficicient, take for an example TVs, the quality of the picture is improving, the size of the screen is increasing but the latest LCD TVs are drawing significantly less power.

The same applies in ICT, an old first generation Ethernet switch supporting 200W can consume 1.7KiloWatts, yet a leading edge Ethernet switch in today's market can consume as little as 800Watts. Also bear in mind that older equipment as well as consuming more power also require more cooling to overcome the less efficient heat dissipation.

Utilising new generation devices will not only dramatically reduce power consumption but also reduce the need for as much cooling, leading to a positive effect on operational costs and reduction of the carbon footprint.

Environmentally Intelligent ICT

A modern intelligent ICT infrastructure can manage its own energy consumption. Many devices such as IP phones, wireless devices, printers etc draw power directly from the ICT network using Power over Ethernet. Today ICT infrastructures and solutions ensure that those devices only receive the power they need using auto negotiation techniques on connection and ongoing monitoring. For instance, Avaya has reduced the power consumption of its IP handsets to just 7Watts compared to the Cisco IP handsets that consume 15Watts, the Extreme LAN, where the phones draw their power from recognises that the phones only require 7watts, so that's what it provides to each phone.

The IT manager can also define and implement energy saving policies and then allow the ICT infrastructure itself to administer these policies. For example, the ability to turn the power off to selected devices when they are not needed, for example during times when the offices are closed.

If you take for example busy office with core office hours of 9 to 5, in most current scenarios, the department's phones and other devices are powered on around the clock. With dynamic power management, devices can automatically be powered down at 17:00 and then restarted the following day at 09:00 (whilst still allowing for individual exceptions for emergency cover and out of hours working). If you also power down on weekends, that's an immediate 75% potential savings in electrical consumption, a significant reduction.

Transformational ICT

One of the most high profile environmental considerations, as well as the increasing fuel prices is the impact of travel. For a business this includes travel for employees to and from their place of work, business related travel to meet with colleagues, clients and the impact of the distribution of products and information from that organisation.

Technology can provide effective solutions that allow an organisation to significantly reduce the amount of travel that is required by both its employees, suppliers and customers, including:

However, this requires a bit of cultural change; changing habits and working practices. By including the use of such solutions into the business processes within an organisation, encouraging employees to use these solutions in preference to more conventional methods and providing technical solutions that truly provide a working experience that encourages take-up.

Green ICT Supply
Purchasing equipment and services from sources with a rigorous policy surrounding the environmental impact of their own business is another factor that must be included, this is becoming more prevalent in the tenders G3 sees. For the CIO considerations include environmental policies on:

Checking compliance with recognised environmental standards such as the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive during procurement and asking vendors to provide effective disposal and recycling solutions will play an increasingly important part in new investment strategies.

Further Reading

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