The green agenda is now an accepted everyday topic of conversation. All organisations are expected to change their thinking and behaviour to produce a positive impact on the problems of carbon footprint, emissions, sustainability and recycling. The ICT management within an organisation has a key part to play.

There are many areas in ICT that are critical in sustainability improvement and environmental impact reduction, but the main two are environmentally efficient ICT and environmentally intelligent ICT.

Modern equipment is designed and manufactured to be energy efficient. A modern switch typically consumes less then half the power of its three year old predecessor so its overall cost of operation is lower.

Modern devices are also designed to run cooler, and hence, more reliably. Cooler running also means less cooling in the comms room. This reduction has a massive environmental impact and can add up to large energy savings from both an environmental and monetary perspective.

An intelligent ICT implementation, designed using the energy efficiency features prevalent on many modern devices, allows ICT managers to dynamically administer energy consumption.

Many devices now take power directly from the data networking estate through PoE (Power over Ethernet). These include IP phones and wireless access points. With the management of these devices under the automated control of the intelligent ICT system it allows the IT manager to define and implement energy saving policies and then allows the ICT infrastructure itself to administer these policies. This includes the ability to turn the power off to selected devices when they are not needed, for example during times when the offices are closed.

An example would be a busy office running 9 to 5. In most scenarios, the department’s phones are powered on and drawing the normal load around the clock. With dynamic power management, devices can automatically be powered down at the end of the working day and then restarted the next morning. Add to that a full power down on weekends and an organisation can immediately save in excess of 75% in electrical consumption.

It is clear that the ICT infrastructure not only plays a pivotal role in the effective identification and delivery of services that can transform an organisation’s business model, but it has a clear role to play in how an organisation can optimise its environmental impact.

It is also clear that the visibility of sustainability will continue to rise in both the private and public sectors. This will make significant changes on how an organisation behaves during procurement, implementation and operation.

By deploying an environmentally intelligent and efficient ICT infrastructure an organisation can adhere to the environmental standards; position itself as an environmentally sensitive and aware entity as well as save itself money.