5 Obvious Green IT Practices

Here is a starting point. Anyone who wants to take their technology and business Green should take a look a t these 5 Green IT Practices. While some of them may not apply to you or make sense due to the nature or size of your business, there is at least one thing here that can work for your company. Have a look!

1. Reduce Power Consumption. This is perhaps the easiest to accomplish. The average worker is at their desk for 9 hours per day, 5 days a week. When their day is over, their PC’s are left on and are using energy. Utilizing applications to manage desktop power settings can save close to $60 per PC per year on energy costs. With the advancement in virtualization technologies, it is possible to reduce physical hardware necessity buy up to 65% and therefore reduce overall energy consumption. It is estimated that up to 9% of the percent of energy costs are generated by IT hardware like PC’s, Servers, switches, printers and the like.

2. Reduce Paper Waste. The average employee can waste over $80 in paper and ink per year. This is due to the unnecessary printing of email documents and websites. Implementing printer management software requiring users to be at the printer at the time the job runs through, or that prevents users from printing websites and other unnecessary item with expensive color ink can save these costly resources.

3. Buy responsibly manufactured and energy efficient hardware. Purchasing hardware that is manufactured from more environmentally friendly plastics, or containing lower levels of toxic elements like mercury, lead and cadmium creates less of a footprint and can make great strides in reducing the flow of toxic e-waste into landfills. Energy efficient hardware reduces the overall energy consumption for the life of the hardware and can save hundreds of dollars over the life of the computer.

4. Virtualization and the cloud. With the advancement of virtualization and cloud based business technologies, server hardware can be reduced by up to 65% and energy consumption can be reduced by up to 80%. This in turn reduces energy consumption and prevents tons of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere. Also, there has been a new movement towards green datacenter design that promises to reduce energy consumption even further. The EPA rates enterprise datacenters on set of criteria called Power Usage Effectiveness. PUE ratings lower than 2.0 are considered to be good for the environment. Following these guidelines, and keeping the average datacenters PUE rating below 2.0 will help make great progress towards a greener future.

5. Remote Workforce Initiatives. The average commuter travels 32 miles per day on their commute to and from the office. With the average gas mileage at around 20mpg this translates into roughly 2.9 metric tons of CO2 per employee per year. A remote workforce is a great way to reduce energy costs and usage by eliminating Desktop PC’s from the office. The reduction of hardware and electricity costs, are just the beginning. All of the computers and monitors create excess heat which can add to the energy costs of climate control within the office. Utilizing secure remote connections as well as cloud based solutions, VoIP phone systems that work anywhere you can plug in, and conference bridge lines allow for the completion of almost any business critical task.