IT sustainability

Can You Reimagine Your Legacy?

There are many different paths an organisation can take when starting its journey to sustainable IT.

One of the most immediate and impactful methods is to pursue operational efficiencies where IT simply uses less. As Gartner noted in its research paper, ‘The Road to a Net Zero Data Center’ improving server utilisation levels is a significant way to reduce an enterprise’s carbon footprint. There is a “win-win” opportunity to reduce both cost and carbon emissions – research suggest that eliminating resource waste can reduce your energy use by up to 80%.

“Enterprises can reduce costs and carbon emissions with the right effort.”

Moving from on-premises or inefficient data centre hosting to a public cloud can also reduce carbon footprint significantly. Compared to in-house IT operations, Azure and AWS use their server systems with much greater attention to power optimisation and utilisation levels. They are able to share and dynamically allocate resources among multiple customers leading to less energy use for power distribution and cooling.

In the same way that moving 30 people in a bus uses less fuel than each person being their own cars, a pool of servers shared by a hundred companies will always be more carbon- and cost-efficient than having one server in each of a hundred data centres.

Fortunately, optimising cloud and data centre resources doesn’t mean a compromise between application performance and reducing carbon footprint.

Application resource management (ARM) tools can dynamically allocate precisely the right level of capacity according to demand. As demand peaks, additional resources can be added to assure the customer experience, but are then removed when the peak passes. By reducing unnecessary use of resources in real-time not only saves costs, but also improves the long-term energy consumption profile.