Green IT for a better future

Stop using vehicles and reduce your carbon footprint, recycle your newspapers, take a shower instead of bath. These are some common guidelines you would find everywhere around you and not without a reason. With the deteriorating environment, a change in lifestyle is imperative and “Go Green” is the new mantra. Green IT is an important peg in the wheel of this movement and we will try and understand some simple things about Green IT through the blog.
So, what are some of the reasons why a company would want to venture in eco-friendly products or services? Few of them are enlisted below:
• Regulations
• Cost Savings
• Customers/Sales
• Shareholder pressure
• Company image/reputation
• Genuine concern
Role of IT: IT-related CO2 emissions alone have been estimated at two per cent of the world’s total. Not only can everyone work together to reduce this figure, but IT itself can support the greening of other processes as well (the remaining 98 per cent!).
A good way to start cleaning up your IT is to include environmental questions in your purchasing requests. Questions such as ‘Are you ISO 14001 certified?’ or ‘Do the devices meet energy or environmental certifications?’ encourage your IT suppliers to demonstrate the environmental credentials of their company and the products you’re buying. A tip worth remembering is that, while purchasing , the whole life implications of acquisitions, should be to look at including the opportunities for reusing
or recycling products when you’ve finished with them.

Managed print service is a good practice in order to incorporate Green IT. Thus, consolidating a large number of personal printers into fewer central models can improve print cost management, while saving on energy and paper use.

A thin client approach can be very handy if it suits your business needs. Best part about it is that, it has a shelf life of around 8 years or more and consumes very little power. Thus the CPUs can be done away with.

Data centres consume a lot of electricity and this demand, along with the size of the associated utility bill, adds a significant cost for a company.. The computers, storage devices and air-conditioning equipment work fully efficiently while the server computers run at less than 30 per cent capacity and, although more effective than the average desktop machine, this isn’t using them to their fullest potential. If you can double the amount of work each processor does, you can halve the number of devices in use and cut the overall environmental impact. This can be done with the help of virtualization software which enables applications to run wherever there’s room for them. Previously, a server might have run a single application. Now each one can run a mix of jobs and earn its keep more effectively. Reducing the amount of equipment releases space and liberates the redundant machines for reuse or recycling.

After you’ve finished with your IT products, what happens when they’re no longer needed?

The priorities for all material things are reduce, reuse and recycle - in that order of importance. If you can extend the working life of your IT products, you reduce the environmental consequences of mining, manufacture, packaging, shipping and disposal. Can you upgrade something rather than finish using it? If you have to replace it, can someone else inside your organization use it? If not, charities and refurbishing organizations may be able to extend the product’s life. And, waiting at the end of the line, many organisations, including some manufacturers themselves, are willing to take equipment back and recycle the components into new products.


Although IT devices consume energy, you can use them to control energy, particularly electricity consumption. You can use IT systems to take care of building management. For example, using movement sensors, thermostats can be adjusted, lights
switched on and off, and computers switched off out of hours and reawakened for software upgrades.

In short, some of the steps for achieving Green IT are:

 Commit to sustainability from the very top of the organisation
 Make use of the many sources of publicly available environmental information
 Include lifecycle questions in requests for proposals (RFPs) and when buying informally
 Specify equipment appropriate to its planned use
 Request energy efficient machines and power supplies
 Extend the working life of equipment if it’s still functional and trouble-free
 Reuse redundant equipment elsewhere – including mobile phones and chargers
 Recycle IT hardware, but only if you can’t extend or reuse
 Raise the temperature of (parts of) the data centre
 Drop PCs and screens into sleep or standby after 15 minutes of inactivity
 Switch off screen savers
 Turn off inactive equipment (such as PCs, printers and network devices) at night
 Get out of the habit of using paper – go electronic as much as possible
 Reduce the number of printers
 Print on both sides by default
 Encourage staff to participate in web-meetings and webinars to reduce travel when appropriate
 Virtualise applications, storage and servers in the data centre wherever appropriate
 Ensure that data centre cooling equipment is optimised to the new arrangements




Finally, do ask the following questions to yourself to go on the right track:

• Can IT help me reduce my CO2 emissions?
• Can I substitute a physical process flow with a digital one?
• Can I use IT to enable greater awareness and control of my environmental impact?