Using Green IT To Reduce Your Environmental Impact

One of the biggest trends for businesses across all industries and sectors these days is, of course, sustainability. 

Consumers are increasingly interested in spending their money with those companies that are able to demonstrate that they put environmental protections at the heart of all they do and, as time goes on, brands that don’t embrace this as a core value will surely see their competitive foothold start to slip.

Business in the 21st century naturally involves the use of technology in some capacity or other and, as such, herein lies some significant opportunities to reduce the environmental impact of your organisation.

What is green IT?

Simply put, green IT is the use of sustainable computing resources, with the aim being to negate the effects that IT operations have on the planet. 

Companies can be more eco-friendly at work by investing in energy-efficient hardware, recycling old and broken equipment and optimising data centre operations, important given that current projections indicate that the tech sector will make up 14 per cent of the world’s carbon footprint by 2040.

Rather than viewing green IT as a set of products available for purchase, it can be beneficial to think about it as a set of practices to follow.

Of course, this will mean buying more energy-efficient hardware where appropriate, but it also means using renewable energy such as wind or solar, introducing more efficient cooling systems in data centres, using low-power states on devices and using cloud computing data centres and pay-as-you-go IT services, as well as reducing electronic waste and minimising the impact of IT across its entire life cycle.

What are the benefits of green IT?

Adopting green IT can help support the environment through reduced energy consumption, reduced waste and reduced pollution, but there are other benefits that businesses may also want to consider, as well.

These include:

- Reduced operational costs

- Improved regulatory compliance

- Improved brand reputation and image

- Increased appeal to different demographics

- Enhanced employee recruitment and retention

Developing green IT strategies for business

Digital technology is one of the most polluting sectors in the world - and, with the advent of artificial intelligence, its impact on the planet is only going to get worse as time goes on.

To develop your own green IT strategy, you will need to focus on software efficiency, structure and quality, as well as the hardware that your business uses. 

Adopting sustainable techniques such as using energy-efficient programming languages and eco-friendly tools and frameworks to measure carbon footprints can help reduce energy use quite significantly indeed.

From there, you can start to think about how to optimise your IT infrastructure, whether that’s working with companies and suppliers that prioritise renewables, sourcing renewables-powered data centres, adopting renewable energy or migrating to the cloud.

IT procurement is also something else to bear in mind and if you really want to go green, it will be necessary to work with sustainable vendors and extend the lifespan of your hardware, only buying that which is necessary, keeping hardware in use for as long as you can and going for energy-efficient makes and models wherever possible.

This might all seem like a big undertaking and, of course, it is… but small incremental changes are the key to success, so now’s the time to take that first step towards going green as a business.