In 2015, the United Nations proposed its 17 Sustainable Development Goals – commonly known as SDGs – designed to achieve world-wide sustainable development by 2030. These were adopted by leaders of more than 150 countries around the world, and may provide the 360 degree framework to deliver inclusive prosperity.
With this bold objective, organisations are asking the million dollar question – what’s the progress been like so far? One thing that is certain is that organisations have come to the correct conclusion that this initiative must be corporate-led.
Organisations are quickly looking into their OpEx to identify key areas to focus on which will contribute to this sustainability initiative. A new report by Greenpeace shows US tech giants are increasingly buying into renewable energy.
With that in mind, organisations pay little attention to the idea of sustainable IT because they don’t think that their IT operations are impacting the environment in any significant way. Yet the truth is that every time an employee turns on an office computer or prints out a document, the carbon footprint of that company increases.
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), corporate data centres are among the largest users of energy in the country, accounting for about 2 percent of total energy use.
The Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) estimates that all that energy consumed by corporate computers, servers, disk arrays, and the cooling systems that keep them running, will result in about 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere by 2020.
Facts such as these may leave the leaders of small and medium-sized organizations in a state of perplexity. How to be good corporate citizens towards the environment without turning off all their computers?
This leaves the daunting question: “Where to start?”
How can organisations reduce their environmental impact while still receiving the IT services their operations depend on?
Start by taking a baseline measurement of where you are today, making incremental improvements, and measuring the impact you’ve had. Greening information technology is probably the most formidable change that an organisation can undertake. Moving to a model where you design and operate your infrastructure to minimise ecological impact takes the involvement of virtually every part of a company.
How? What?
The answer to that question is, THE CLOUD. But not just any cloud or it wouldn’t make much of a difference.
Global Green IT provider – Basis Bay for one, believes in the optimisation of the environment’s scarce resources – be it from a planetary or business perspective. Basis Bay’s approach to sustainability is from a holistic perspective that encompasses the framework on “Optimisation of acquisition, deployment and management of IT resources with sustainability in mind”.
The Basis Bay Sustainable Cloud is a private and hybrid cloud offering and includes comprehensive cloud services in a fully virtualized network environment.
The service is a fully virtualized cloud on premium legacy systems, which still drives high end and mission critical services with complex requirements such as those found in the financial services.
Built on premium green data centres, network and server infrastructure, the Basis Bay sustainable cloud is designed with a holistic approach on Green IT. The cloud does not only provide IT infrastructure services, but also helps clients to reduce their carbon footprint.
As more of the corporate IT workload shifts to the cloud, the overall environmental impact is substantially reduced. That’s because major cloud operators, such as Basis Bay, are committed to being 100 percent “green” in their own data centres. So, when a smaller company moves its IT operations into the cloud, it makes a definite contribution to the environmental health of the planet.
Change is inevitable. But the transitioning of change doesn’t have to be complex nor expensive.