There is no denying that one of the biggest risks that our planet currently faces is climate change. As such, it is incredibly important that businesses from every single sector are doing all that they can to reduce the amount of energy that they use and limit their carbon footprint as significantly as they possibly can.
There has been new advice created by the government to ensure that industry experts are doing all that they can to help businesses work in a way that is much cleaner and energy efficient. This was highlighted recently at the COP26 summit in Glasgow in November and, as such, is something that several different organisations hold in very high regard.
Though there are a lot of pieces of advice out there, there are some which are universal regardless of the kind of work your tech company does. As such, when you are trying to reduce your energy consumption, you should do so with the below in mind.
Take the Time to Think About Your Purchases
When you are operating a tech business, there are going to be several different purchases that you make – this could be for hardware, support, software, and so on. As such, if you aren’t taking care with who you are purchasing from, you are going to have a poor carbon footprint before your business has even done anything.
This means that you need to research who you are buying from. Have a chat with your suppliers and find out how seriously they take their carbon footprint. What are their green credentials and are they something that you would be happy to work with? You should also consider buying repurposed IT equipment because this is a lot more energy efficient than what is required to make brand-new equipment.
Not only this, but you should take the time to consider the products you’re buying are as energy efficient as they can be. For instance, you might create products or run systems that use a discrete circuit. There is nothing technically wrong with this but the packaging that is necessary to put together an ic integrated circuit is a lot more environmentally friendly. Small changes like this can go a very long way.
Programme Keeping in Mind Energy Efficiency
When you are designing your software, there are several ways that you can do this, and naturally, that means that some are more environmentally friendly than others. When you are in the design process, try to plan your moves in a way that will minimize energy use. Even just making minor changes and small improvements, when these are amplified across many different systems, can make a massive difference.
Some of the different questions that you should consider when it comes to designing your software include whether you can limit data movement anymore. Does the data that you are using have to be calculated to hundreds of decimal places? Is there anything that you can do which will improve idle efficiency?
Revise Your Data Storage
You tend to find that larger cloud providers are a lot more efficient as opposed to the more traditional enterprise data centres. This is thanks to their IT operation and equipment efficiency, as well as the way the data structure for their data centre works and how much they can use renewable energy in their business.
If you are currently storing your data on-premises, then you should consider moving more digitally, such as on servers to the cloud. You should also think about whether the data you have is needed (would you consider it redundant, trivial, or obsolete?) as when you take the time to consider all of these, you are going to be able to minimize how much storage you need, which will have a positive effect for your energy efficiency.
Consider Remote Working
There are several different ways that you can use remote working to your business’s advantage. If you work smart and ensure that all your employees have the tools that are necessary to do your job properly, then you are going to be able to encourage remote working a lot more. This can help with reducing your carbon footprint because employees will not have to worry about driving to work and you will be encouraging cloud-based productivity.
Conclusion
Businesses need to make sure that they are doing everything that they can to reduce their carbon footprint as much as possible. There are several different ways that they’re able to do this but some of the most efficient for tech companies are those which are discussed above. Although this may seem like a daunting task, you’ll feel much better once you’ve evaluated your current position and made changes to reduce your carbon footprint as a business.
