IT pays to go green

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IT pays to go green!

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PCs and related technologies account for 15% of the UK’s electricity usage (Carbon Trust). Updating hardware to more energy efficient models and adopting strategic IT aligned with your business goals and processes can reduce your energy consumption and reduce costs.

Here is our guide to reducing your carbon footprint:

	Use technology to switch off devices automatically Imagine having the ability to use your Power over Ethernet (PoE) network to switch on and off devices (IP Telephones to PCs) and power them back up when you need them. Cisco’s new energy management technology EnergyWise helps to measure, regulate and report on your energy use with a view to controlling energy consumption. It lets you control what devices receive power and when.
	Virtual IT Support By maintaining your network remotely STS can often resolve problems more quickly than if an engineer visits your site. By keeping travelling to a minimum we’re lowering our carbon footprint and passing on savings to our clients through cost competitive support services.
	Work anytime anywhere VPN's (Virtual Private Networks) give employees secure remote access to your phone system, data network, CRM system or Intranet as if they were sat in the office. Implementing these technologies soon pays for itself in fuel savings alone and can often lead to a more flexible, efficient and motivated workforce.
	Automatically switch off office equipment A single computer and monitor left on 24 hours a day will cost around £45 a year (Carbon Trust). Multiply that by the number of computers your business has and you can soon work out how much PCs could be costing your business. Switching devices off when they’re not in use could reduce this to less than £10 a year per PC and prolong the lifespan of equipment. We can let you know if your policies are being followed to ensure you achieve the expected savings.
	VMware server virtualisation Server virtualisation is the process of consolidating services to a much smaller number of physical servers to provide a shared service. Your business could save 80% more energy by virtualising servers. VMware server virtualisation enables you to make full use of your server's processing power by running more than one server operating system per physical server, increasing IT capacity from 5-15% to 60-80%, you can free up space and power as each virtualised server can save 7000kWh of electricity annually.
	Host meetings online Travelling to meetings and to and from the office all adds up to an increased carbon footprint. Using WebEx to host meetings you can easily share applications and collaborate on documents, in exactly the same way as you would in a physical meeting. And because it’s so quick and easy to set up an ad-hoc WebEx session, a culture of collaboration is encouraged within a business leading to productivity gains. Reduce CO2 emissions too: 4 tons of CO2 are eliminated for every server virtualised the equivalent to taking 1.5 cars off the road. Our own experience of virtualising our servers has reduced our power consumption to the point where the runtime on our UPS has increased from 11 minutes to 44 minutes, so we’ve achieved better availability as a direct result of virtualisation as well as the energy savings.
	Cisco Wireless Adaptable Management Organisations can realise measurable cost savings and reduce their carbon footprint. By using the Cisco WCS adaptive power management feature to turn Cisco Aironet lightweight access point radios on or off at scheduled intervals (hour, day, and week) to reduce energy consumption, carbon footprint and operating expenses.