5 Strategies To Make Workspaces Greener and More Sustainable
- By Gary Taylor, Kyndryl
- November 22, 2022
Like digital transformation, sustainability is essential to an organization’s core corporate strategy. According to university research, information and communications technology products and infrastructure may be responsible for 2.1%-3.9% of all greenhouse gas emissions. This number could be even more significant than the aviation industry.
The good news is that there are several simple strategies companies can implement to reduce power consumption and carbon emissions generated from manufacturing new hardware devices. Here are the top five best practices:
- Use Virtual Desktops and Apps
Work is no longer constrained to a physical location but a flexible, personalized, and collaborative experience that enables employees to work from anywhere. Organizations adopting virtual desktops can allow remote users to access their desktop session from anywhere, using any internet-connected device. What’s more, the growth in 5G connectivity will remove network latency issues, which will significantly enhance the user experience. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) promises not only to let an organization’s employees work securely from anywhere using any device but also fundamentally reduce the number of office commutes, which means lower transportation emissions, fewer real-estate requirements, and reduced greenhouse gas from office heating and cooling systems.
- Repurpose Aging Laptops and PCs
Instead of disposing of aging endpoint devices that still work, organizations can upgrade them to a compact and lightweight operating system like the IGEL OS. Such OSs use fewer CPU resources, so devices that are almost a decade old can be used to run Windows 10/11 virtual desktops. This approach saves the cost of major upgrades and helps keep older devices out of landfills. According to a Citrix study, if organizations repurpose aging laptops and PCs to use virtual environments, it can extend the life of Windows-based devices by two years, reducing 40% emissions per 1000 users. Virtual desktops also require fewer hardware refresh cycles. Hence, organizations no longer need to purchase high-end computing equipment, improving the business bottom line and reducing emissions generated from manufacturing and supplying new devices.
- Integrate New-Age Collaboration Tools
An integrated collaboration solution (Microsoft Teams) within a virtual environment helps organizations reduce power consumption costs and lower maintenance overhead. That said, running Teams in a virtual environment can be pretty challenging, as such tools have high resource requirements. Therefore, IT teams must choose the right technologies after due evaluation to mitigate this obstacle. For example, the proper access solution can help offload functions to the access device (such as audio and video calling). In addition, the right edge OS will improve employee experience and lower backend hardware costs.
- Leverage Public Cloud for VDI
Public cloud data centers tend to be more efficient, have more significant economies of scale, and sometimes even be carbon neutral. Leading public cloud providers (like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) can monitor and predict the demand of workloads and adjust their capacity to operate more efficiently while reducing energy consumption. Many have adopted aggressive goals to switch to 100% renewable energy in the coming years. For example, Azure aims to be fully powered by green energy by 2025, while Google strives to run on carbon-free energy by 2030. If organizations move their desktops to the public cloud using VDI, they can significantly reduce their on-premise infrastructure overhead. Furthermore, since public clouds use best-of-breed security and virtualized environments are centrally managed, the overall infrastructure is at a much lower risk of cyberattacks and breaches.
- Embrace Flexible Working and Hot Desking
The commercial and real-estate sector accounts for more than a third (40%) of all carbon emissions globally. Organizations that embrace flexible working and hot desking (i.e., no more fixed desks in the office) can use their space more efficiently (fewer desks and more collaboration spaces), reduce real estate expenses, and lower operating and other maintenance costs. If organizations embrace hot desking, they can reduce real-estate portfolios by as much as 20-40%. By helping organizations adopt technologies that support flexible working and hot desking, IT teams can play an essential role in making the business more sustainable, efficient, and profitable.
Studies show employees increasingly want a more sustainable lifestyle and prefer working for climate-aware employers that value sustainability. Data centers dramatically reduced carbon footprints in the past by adopting server virtualization. Organizations should consider following suit by adopting the same model for office environments to help trim costs, increase flexibility, meet employee expectations and further boost their green credentials.
Gary Taylor, responsible for developing digital workspace services for Kyndryl, wrote this article.
The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of DigitalWorkforceTrends. Image credit: iStockphoto/Gang Zhou