Green IT and Sustainability

3 Ways to aid your businesses’ green IT and sustainability

The environment may not be at the forefront of everyone’s mind (although it should be), but it is growing increasingly more crucial to consider when making business decisions. At Vissensa, our environmental impact is something we consider greatly, and as such, we try to soften not just our own environmental impact in terms of the way we conduct business, but also the IT systems that we provide for others. Here are 3 ways in which Vissensa can help your business with green IT and sustainability!

1. Refurbished Equipment

Many companies opt for an approach of buying new laptops and throwing the old ones away. The United Nations University estimates that a staggering 45 million tonnes of computers, televisions, mobile phones and other electronic goods are thrown away every year. All too often people equate one small component of a device breaking as requiring a change in device altogether. To make it worse, this waste is ending up at the bottom of landfills, when a large amount of it could be easily recycled and refurbished.

At Vissensa, we try to combat this by sourcing and using refurbished computer equipment. Because of this, we can ensure that we extend the lives of these perfectly viable pieces of technology. Minimising the amount that we needlessly doom to the depths of landfills. If you would like to discuss refurbished IT equipment (UK) to do your bit please contact us.

2. Energy Efficient Data Centres

Another exciting development in green IT and sustainability is the ways in which data centres have adapted. For example, many data centres have worked extensively in recent years to improve the energy efficiency of their data centre cooling. There’s been a wide variety of cooling methods crop up in recent years. Some data centres in colder regions use the cold air from outside to cool the data centre. Some opt for liquid cooling and use water to cool the data centres. Other developments include Windows recently submerging a data centre in the sea to keep it cool. Equinix AM3 plants grass on the roof of their data centres to improve cooling. All of these developments have improved the energy efficiency of these data centres and will be improvements on the majority of in-house server rooms.

We are proud of our partnership with Datum and Equinix for hosting our colocation and cloud servers. They both use more environmentally friendly methods of cooling their data centres than the traditional approach of solely using air conditioning. Colocating your servers in a data centre or hosting in our cloud environment will all help your organisation to limit power used in your server rooms.

3. Remote Working

Another way to help green IT and sustainability within your business is the use of collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams which allow for effective teamwork and meetings regardless of where you are be it next door, in the next county or across the globe.

These tasks can now be done without the need for that close proximity and can instead be completed outside of the office. This reduces the carbon emissions produced by large numbers of people travelling to and from the office on their daily commute or in the field. By having these meetings from the comfort of our own homes or office, we have the potential to reduce the emissions created by the daily commute exponentially. In fact, a 2017 survey found that remote working decreased emissions by 39.5%, created 32.2% less paper waste and 20.5% less energy consumption.  Not only does this reduce transport emissions but causes people to be more conservative with the energy they use as they are now the ones paying the bills.

So if you’re looking to decrease your environmental impact, Vissensa has the means to do so, with plenty of actionable ways to assist your business on the road to green IT and sustainability. If you’re interested in sustainability within the technology industry, check out our blog post about “The Greta Effect"