Green is the New Black
Many businesses are realizing that leveraging IT to reduce their environmental footprint can also result in significant cost efficiencies and valuable good will. Yet sorting through the many green alternatives to find the ones that make strategic sense for your business is a challenge.
Where to begin? If you are looking to find environmental and budgetary savings in your business, an ideal first step is to establish and analyse your energy expenditures. Organizations on average spend at least five per cent of their total IT budgets on energy, and projections suggest that figure could increase two to three times within the next five years. Those energy cost increases are expected to be even steeper for large, data-intensive enterprises. Indeed, data centre energy consumption in 2006 was twice the level of 2000, and it is expected energy consumption by servers and data centres could nearly double again by 2011. It is clear that managing energy use and getting the maximum from your IT potential should be a key component of your green strategy.
After identifying your energy expenses and putting in place steps to manage power consumption, there are numerous additional steps you can take to continue the greening of your business.
Take a long, hard look at travel costs in your organization, beginning with the rubber on the road expenses. Are there alternative means of transport that employees can take when travelling on business? Or, for example, if employees do need to rent a vehicle while travelling, encourage them to use hybrids or other fuel-efficient vehicles.
Better still, identify ways to minimize travel altogether. For example, videoconferencing is an effective tool that delivers a cost-effective, green way of communicating. Pulling together staff who are spread among a variety of locations via videoconference delivers the advantages of meeting face-to-face without incurring travel and other related costs.
There are other technological solutions to help with the greening of your business. What if you want to deliver a message to clients or prospective clients? For example, at Allstream, interactive, real time collaboration tools are used to facilitate virtual meetings, share presentations, and enable geographically dispersed teams to whiteboard together, etc. All of this is done through the use of tools that enable personal contact without the cost or environmental implications of travel.
Telecommuting is another travel-reducing tool, which is largely underused to date. One 2008 study found that 33 million Americans have jobs that could be performed at home, a result that could translate into roughly 3 million Canadians in the same situation. In the U.S. case, having these people telecommute would eliminate 154 billion miles of driving a year. Reduced commuting time offers employee benefits too: the research demonstrated that by telecommuting, employees would reap the equivalent of five work weeks of free time annually. This, in turn, translates into improved productivity and makes possible real estate savings.
For larger data centre operations there are several options to consider. The use of scalable equipment and infrastructure allows you to manage your energy needs, for example, expanding only when the time is right. Other ways to control energy demand include working with a partner to provide managed services, and outsourcing some of your technology requirements. These steps enable you to meet your technology needs without expanding energy consumption. Another consideration would be to virtualize storage. Today, with so much information being created, IT departments are mandated to get the most out of each storage unit. Storage virtualization makes it possible to combine all storage sources into one centrally managed resource, delivering time and money savings and attendant environmental benefits from reducing storage space.
Finally, many consultants expect the pressure for greenhouse gas legislation to increase. So greening your business's IT operations doesn't just make economic and environmental sense at present, it could also make sense from a regulatory compliance standpoint in the near future.
A strategic approach to enhancing your business's green performance has numerous advantages. There are the economic benefits from improved IT efficiency, the environmental payback, and also the benefits that accrue to your business's reputation for taking a leadership role on such a key issue.
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