How to effectively employ sustainable IT for your company

Rich Garrison, Senior Principal, Alfa Tech

What is sustainable IT? As many companies deploy sustainability strategies aimed at improving energy efficiency, preserving natural resources and lowering operating costs, IT is becoming a major part of this initiative.
“Over the past few years, many companies have focused on LEED Certification and sustainable design methods to achieve these objectives,” says Rich Garrison, Senior Principal at Alfa Tech. “Now, IT organizations are continually pressed to deliver more by way of applications and content, while being asked to lower capital and expense costs. This is combined with the fact that for many organizations, IT is one of the largest consumers of energy and natural resources to operate data centers, labs and office environments.”
Smart Business spoke with Garrison about the impacts of sustainable IT in today’s business world.
How does sustainable IT work?
Information technology leaders are turning to sustainability-focused initiatives to reduce costs and align with corporate sustainability strategies. Sustainable IT is simply the process of planning, designing, and implementing technologies that improve efficiency and reduce environmental impact.
How is virtualization and cloud technology impacting sustainable IT?
Sustainable IT examples include the wide adoption of virtualization technologies intended to reduce the number of physical servers and increase the utilization of these hardware assets. The next level beyond virtualization is the adoption of private or public cloud service offerings, which allows companies to utilize computing hardware, often hosted by third-party service providers. The primary objective is to have ‘just in time’ capacity, improved reliability and more predictable costs. While cloud is not for everyone, the adoption rate is high and on the radar for most IT professionals.
What role can Wi-Fi play with sustainable IT?
Another technology having a significant impact is wireless or Wi-Fi technologies. In today’s workplace, employees have an average of three wireless devices each. With the adoption of smartphones, tablets and laptops, some analysts predict conventional desktop workstations will be obsolete within the next five years. This adoption of wireless devices in the workplace combined with the evolution of a more collaborative workspace means there’s a demand for more reliable wireless networks with adequate bandwidth.
With new or remodeled facilities, it’s important to weigh the impact of architectural considerations on the performance of wireless technologies. The selection of materials and the building’s physical layout can significantly affect the wireless network’s performance. Predictive tools can help design a wireless solution during the building project’s design phase and eliminate potential issues in advance. As companies adopt wireless solutions, it also creates an opportunity to reduce and, in some cases, eliminate traditional structured cabling systems. From a sustainability perspective, this has major advantages when eliminating the use of copper material.
How are building monitoring and automation systems influencing sustainable IT?
As facilities organizations focus on building monitoring systems (BMS) and automation systems (BAS) to optimize the use of lighting, HVAC and other energy consuming resources, these BMS and BAS solutions are becoming more advanced and sophisticated. The products are becoming more network-enabled and require more advanced and reliable network infrastructure to support them.
For many companies, building management and control systems have become critical applications requiring the same level and support as traditional business applications. As part of the IT sustainability strategy, IT organizations also are leveraging these systems to monitor and trend their consumption of power and energy efficiency. There’s a significant need to engage IT professionals earlier when designing buildings or data center facilities to provide input or solutions for a well-architected network capable of supporting these building systems and applications.
While other IT-related sustainability initiatives can be considered, virtualization, wireless and BMS are greatly impacting both IT organizations and facility planning.
Rich Garrison is Senior Principal at Alfa Tech. Reach him at (408) 487-1209 or [email protected].
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