7 tips for a greener IT

More and more peo­ple are becom­ing envi­ron­men­tally friendly by sep­a­rat­ing waste, cycling or buy­ing items with­out plas­tic. But what does this look like in the pro­fes­sional envi­ron­ment? Many com­pa­nies cause, espe­cially through high elec­tric­ity con­sump­tion, huge CO² emis­sions and use a lot of resources. Only 26% of the ger­man com­pa­nies sur­veyed have a strat­egy for green change that they also imple­ment con­sis­tently [source: Sta­tista]. But what are suit­able strate­gies any­way? Where can one start? And how much does all this cost? The good answer is: it’s not hard at all to make sav­ings. The even bet­ter answer: It even saves money!

Our tips show how it’s done!

The Cloud

If your com­pany has a lot of pro­grams and files run­ning on phys­i­cal servers, it’s worth con­sid­er­ing out­sourc­ing them to the cloud. Through best prac­tice strate­gies, providers are able to make greater use of their servers while simul­ta­ne­ously sav­ing energy and water. This allows for more effi­cient use than in-​house. In addi­tion, this elim­i­nates the need for in-​house server main­te­nance.

Vir­tu­al­iza­tion of servers

If you do need your own servers and can­not eas­ily switch to the cloud, for exam­ple because you are sub­ject to strict data pro­tec­tion guide­lines, there is still a way to save resources with servers. The key­word is vir­tu­al­iza­tion. With server vir­tu­al­iza­tion, sev­eral vir­tual instances are cre­ated on a phys­i­cal server that run inde­pen­dently of each other. Appli­ca­tions can then be installed and oper­ated on these instances. This means that the entire phys­i­cal server does not have to be in oper­a­tion, but only the required par­ti­tions, which in turn leads to a reduc­tion in power and main­te­nance costs.

Lap­tops instead of desk­top PCs

The pos­i­tive thing about lap­tops is not only the guar­an­teed mobil­ity com­pared to PCs. In addi­tion, lap­tops are also designed to save energy so that they don’t break down in the mid­dle of a meet­ing. Con­versely, this means that lap­tops are more envi­ron­men­tally friendly because they can be used in a more energy-​saving way. Thus, mak­ing it a true win-​win sit­u­a­tion.

Sec­ondary use of IT equip­ment

The lifes­pan of IT hard­ware is very long nowa­days, but they are often replaced by new hard­ware before their life cycle even comes close to an end. Since this means that the hard­ware can still run for a long time, it is worth­while to turn to “sec­ond hand hard­ware”. Var­i­ous retail­ers offer “refur­bished hard­ware” with a war­ranty. On the other hand, you can of course also turn your no longer needed hard­ware into money at the retail­ers instead of throw­ing it away.

Using mul­ti­func­tion devices

Some print­ers are quite lim­ited in their func­tions, and so you need other devices, such as a scan­ner, to be able to use all the desired func­tion­al­i­ties. Here, how­ever, it makes more sense to rely on mul­ti­func­tion devices and thus keep the eco­log­i­cal foot­print smaller.

Watch out for envi­ron­men­tal seals

When buy­ing new hard­ware, look for offi­cial envi­ron­men­tal seals such as the Energy Star or Blue Angel. These seals guar­an­tee a lower impact on the envi­ron­ment through energy sav­ings, ease of repair, as well as envi­ron­men­tally friendly man­u­fac­tur­ing.

Paper­less office

The paper­less office is becom­ing increas­ingly pop­u­lar. Mov­ing away from paper and towards dig­i­tal doc­u­ments. The advan­tage here is that because every­thing is dig­i­tized, doc­u­ments can be eas­ily made avail­able online to the appro­pri­ate peo­ple.

If you take these tips to heart, you’ll be well on your way to con­tribut­ing to envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion and tak­ing some of the pres­sure off nature.

Need help migrat­ing your servers to the cloud? Con­tact us.