Creating a greener future together

We all need a healthy environment in which to thrive and therefore all of us must play our part in protecting our precious planet. However, is it possible to be environmentally responsible without compromising business success? The answer to this important question is ABSOLUTELY, and here we will look at how you can achieve this.

Today, more businesses than ever before are recognising that prioritising environmental ethics can enhance their brand, improve their competitive edge and motivate their staff. So, this page will highlight a few of the ways your business can benefit from a strategy that has sustainability at its heart, and explore just some of the steps your IT team can take to help drive positive change in your organisation.

The circular economy

As a society, we are using more natural resources than our planet can regenerate. We can't keep taking without giving. A circular economy looks beyond the current take-make-waste model and aims to redefine growth by focusing on positive society-wide benefits.

A circular economy employs reusing, sharing, repairing, refurbishing, remanufacturing and recycling to create a closed-loop system, minimising the use of new resources and the creation of waste, pollution and carbon emissions.

At Prodec Networks, we believe that now, more than ever, what’s good for the world is good for business. We partner with like-minded businesses, such as Cisco and HPE, to ensure that this can be achieved for our customers.

These programmes are designed to provide your business with the same great quality products you’d expect from new, with the same level of warranty, but with significant cost savings and a much lower impact on the environment. This helps you to stretch your IT budget further, while reducing your carbon footprint – great for business and the environment alike.

Certified remanufactured equipment is pre-owned products that have had critical software and hardware upgrades made and have been thoroughly tested and retested to meet stringent manufacturer specifications. Certified remanufactured equipment meets the same quality standards that you would expect from a new product.

Another significant way you could improve your green credentials is by limiting the amount of travel you and your employees do. Whether it’s long, daily commutes into the offices, or jet-setting around the world for face-to-face meetings, you could be racking up a significant carbon footprint. A unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solution could be the ideal way to tackle this issue.

In addition to the specific environmental benefits that a cloud-based UCaaS solution can offer, there are other reasons that cloud IT services, as a whole, could help reduce your company’s carbon footprint as well.

More and more enterprises are embracing the considerable business benefits that cloud-based IT solutions can bring, including cost savings, scalability and flexibility. Indeed options such as firewall as a service (FWaaS), disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), contact centre as a service (CCaaS) and UCaaS are quickly becoming invaluable to many organisations. However, again, what may be overlooked are the ways in which deploying such solutions, could also benefit the environment. In fact, switching to a cloud IT service could help reduce energy consumption, e-waste and carbon emissions.

Traditional, on-site business data centres can take a great deal of power to operate, requiring a constant energy supply for the server and a cooling system to prevent overheating. However, research suggests that moving business applications to the cloud could significantly cut energy consumption and substantially reduce a company’s carbon footprint, perhaps by as much as 90%.

Shared data centres, used by cloud service providers, such as Prodec, can be run as efficiently as possible, maximising the effectiveness of resources. These facilities can therefore potentially cut overall energy usage, and the greenhouse gases emitted, substantially. Indeed, Prodec runs its services from three highly efficient data centres, one of which is an award-winning green facility, which uses five times less energy per kW of IT load than the average data centre. Needless to say, by switching to cloud-based applications, businesses can also make financial savings by avoiding funding their own energy-guzzling, on-site data centres.

Cloud-based IT solutions can further contribute to greater sustainability by enabling ‘dematerialisation’, which refers to the replacement of physical equipment with virtual equivalents. Migrating to the cloud means that businesses can use fewer machines, with no need to invest in so much on-site hardware, helping to reduce the depletion of natural resources used to create high volumes of equipment, and reducing the e-waste mountain, as such hardware is inevitably disposed of when it reaches the end of its life. In this way, companies can also help cut carbon emissions generated from the manufacture of so many physical products, and make cost savings from not having to invest in on-site equipment, pay for its maintenance, or replace it when required.

So, if you want to improve the green credentials of the IT your organisation uses, as well as cut costs, you might want to consider switching to cloud-based technology solutions.