Green IT Best Practices

Now, this is awkward. You, us, and anyone else who uses IT are complicit in an industry that’s not known for its commitment to sustainability. In the race to flood the planet with new devices with teeny shelf lives, the IT market is responsible for as much greenhouse gas emissions as the airline industry. It greedily sucks up all the water that could put out a century’s worth of wildfires (we made up this statistic, but it’s probably true) and leaves behind tons of e-waste and leached heavy metals. 

And these are just the highlights. Let’s start to fight this mess with some green IT best practices. 

Yeah, But I Am A) A Jerk Or B) Too Busy To Think About Sustainability

We get it. Going green is just another thing on your To Do list. But there’s something else you need to know, especially if you’re a startup looking for an investor to help you scale up. The green agenda is beautiful, and so are green investors. If eco-values aren’t part of your DNA, they should be, and here’s why:

• You’ll have wider access to funding because, in a market where customers are demanding all shades of green, you’ll have an awesome and demonstrable competitive advantage. Investors love that.
• Green credentials and social responsibility give you a bigger customer base: they’ll attract the growing number of customers (B2B as well as B2C) that are green by ethics or by strategy. Some government departments have green goals, including green purchasing. 
• You’ll have wider access to big bucks contracts. Government or big corp contracts often include green requirements.

In other words, green serves your profit motive as well as the planet. Convinced yet? Right, let’s get on with it.

Three Green IT Best Practices 

We’ve divvied up green IT best practices into three categories:

Energy Consumption Best Practices

BONUS! If you configure your IT to consume less energy, you’ll save $ on your bills. Here’s how to do it.

Switch Your Energy to a Renewable Source

Like, duh. If everything you use is renewable, that’s a monster win. OK, it might not be the cheapest, but it’s effective at cutting down those pesky carbon emissions.

Use the Cloud Effectively

Cloud computing eliminates the need to run your own on-premise servers and that’ll cut down on energy consumption. However, be choosy about whom (yes, we’re classy) you select as your cloud company, as some are more energy-efficient than others, or have thirstier data centers, which are cooled with the water we need for, like, drinking and growing food. Important stuff like that. 

Green cloud companies have high utilization rates, i.e., they reduce the number of servers by managing them more efficiently. They’ll also use virtualization technology, which is some kind of creepy magic because it creates multiple virtual versions of hardware, each of which can run different apps and services.  

Look for data center marks of sustainability such as the Uptime Institute’s Efficient IT certification.

Manage Your Power

You know we love mobile device management almost too much, but that’s because it’s bloody good and, by the way, why don’t you have it by now? Use it to minimize your fleet’s energy consumption by:

• Automating powering off devices when they’re not in use and enabling power saving mode.
• Adjusting screen timeout centrally – but yeah, let your people fiddle with it, as sometimes a quick timeout is so frustrating that it can become someone’s villain origin story.
• Monitoring battery health: a sick battery is energy-hungry and guzzles that wattage like mom’s chicken soup.

E-Waste Reduction Best Practices

Think of a dumpster full of computers, tablets, and phones and you’ve just envisioned a dumpster full of e-waste. The trick is to extend the life of these devices through good- old-fashioned asset lifecycle management. Here are some tips for starters: 

Maintain Your Devices

Making sure every device in your fleet has a shiny coat, wet nose, and waggy tail at all times can be challenging, as some of this is a physical care issue, and just how are you supposed to control the actions of your remote workers? Easy – your acceptable use policy or work-from-home policy should articulate your expectations about how your people treat and maintain their devices: proper storage, protective cases, correct battery charging, and even de-clogging those vents to prevent overheating on the regular.

Keep Track of Your Devices

A device that goes AWOL permanently is a device you need to replace, and that means $ lost and a replacement that shouldn’t have happened. MDM solves it with a hefty bunch of anti-theft security measures such as device tracking. 

Manage Those Spares

When you have a large fleet or high churn (i.e., your business sucks so people leave), working out what happened to those now-spare devices can be an unsolvable mystery. Not so with MDM. MDM pulls together a real-time IT asset register, so now you can not only identify which devices are spare and where they are but put policies into place for collecting, cleaning, de-provisioning, and storing those devices until they’re needed again (Ahem. We can do this for you.) This awesome knowledge enables you to manage your spares effectively and reduce the need for new devices. 

Give Them a Sustainable Goodbye

When that sad day comes when a device has come to the end of its useful life for your business, the trashcan should be your last option. There are better, greener, and more glorious alternatives:

• Refurb: some green companies take old devices, strip out the data, refurbish, and resell or donate to a decent cause. What’s not to love about that?
• Donate usable devices to people who could use them – again, there are plenty of organizations, such as Computers With Causes or the Electronic Access Foundation, that will make it easy for you.
• If you’ve ridden that device like a Bronco and it’s never gonna work properly again, it’s time to recycle responsibly. Both Apple and Microsoft have recycling programs, or use a certified electronics recycler.

Use Your Purchasing Power

You’ve got dollars to spend and that means you have influence. Hopefully, your IT procurement strategy will be green-flavored, which means you’ll buy your devices from green suppliers, but you can also influence your other suppliers, too, such as web hosting. You can also influence non-green or non-IT suppliers with an “Oh we’ve changed our policy and we need you to be green by Friday” kind of thing. 

As Shakespeare (probably) once said, “Prithee, sire, there’s nothing better than a bit of economic self-interest to persuade a supplier to go a shade greener.”

We Can Help You Turn Green In a Good Way

We’re not saying we’re a paragon of green yet, but we’re doing our best and we’ve developed some super-quick green IT best practice wins for our clients and our not-yet-clients. Psst! Wanna hear a couple? All you need to do is pick up the phone and give us a call.

Ignition is Silicon Valley’s best (and friendliest) IT security, compliance, and support team. Contact us now – chatting about IT support and cybersecurity is our favorite thing to do!