A Yardstick Is Your Bridge to Greener IT

Alas, everyone in IT these days yearns to be green. But beyond using less electricity, very few tech professionals know how to become more earth friendly. A first step is to replace the whole "green" concept with something more measurable and therefore manageable--like sustainability. We are sustainable when our practices do not permanently deplete our natural and financial resources. Relying heavily on non-renewable resources, IT can never be 100% sustainable, but improving sustainability will reduce both environmental impact and operating costs. Before organizations can work toward such benefits, they must understand where they are starting from. 
 
Even a rudimentary sustainability assessment will provide most organizations with a beginning roadmap for improvement. There is likely to be some low hanging fruit. Examining asset lifecycles, reuse strategy, and surplus management is a good place to start. If you are your organization's evangelist for sustainability, identify a few projects that can yield quick, quantitative returns, then make sure everybody hears about them; nothing engenders support for a more robust approach than a little demonstrated success.

Redemtech has developed a free Sustainable Computing Assessment in partnership with GreenerComputing that is a perfect launchpad for your sustainability journey. With about fifteen minutes, and some detailed knowledge of your organization's hardware infrastructure, the Assessment will produce scorings in key areas such as energy, reuse, and social responsibility. It will also report average scores in each area, so you can revel in just how sustainable you are compared to peer respondents. Then, Assessment yardstick in hand, refer to IDC's whitepaper on sustainable computing Beyond Power for a discussion of the many possibilities to improve the sustainabiliy of IT.