3 IT Approaches to Making your Business more Eco-friendly

If you have a small-to-medium sized business, you might be wondering how you can make it more eco-friendly. There are a lot of different ways in which business creates a footprint. But the good news is that there are many different ways to reduce your company’s carbon footprint and be a greener company overall. The most effective approach to more sustainable business is through the technology your business uses. In other words, your IT!

TechQuarters, an IT company from London, spoke about some of the ways in which IT plays a very important role in keeping the energy footprint of a company down:

“When you think about all the hardware you’re using as a business – your desktop PCs, laptops, printers, maybe even servers depending on your size. These are all contributing to your energy consumption.”

So, what are some of the changes a business could make regarding their technology, to become a more energy efficient business?

Going Remote

“A lot of companies have found they can deliver their services remotely” says TechQuarters. “It’s definitely proven to be the more sustainable option.”

First of all, and perhaps most obviously, if you’re a remote business then you won’t have an office that you need to run. You won’t need to worry about running appliances like coffee machines, fridges, or microwaves, which require significant amounts of energy. You’ll save the energy used to heat the office in the winter. Secondly, going remote also means you can move your business up into the cloud; this means getting rid of servers and other machines dedicated to running your network – all your on-premises network hardware can be replaced by scalable, energy efficient cloud hosting.

Go Paperless

It’s easier than ever to go paperless as a business these days. Take, for example, the Microsoft 365 suite of applications. With this you have Microsoft Word, which is likely where most people produce their documents. But rather than printing those documents out to give to a colleague, you can simply share it to them through OneDrive or SharePoint; and if a document needs reviewing, and then changes need to be made to it, why print it out at all? The document can be reviewed online, and edited in real-time, with a complete history of every version of the document, so you don’t have to worry about keeping records.

Remote IT Support

“We’ve been providing remote IT support based businesses can rely on for a while,” says TechQuarters, “when you think that our helpdesk supports hundreds of businesses, rather than them each having their own helpdesk full of machines, you see how it is more energy efficient for the customer.”

In fact, the majority of IT issues that the average user experiences in 2021 can easily be fixed remotely. As an example, a user may experience technical difficulties that prevent them from getting any work done, and if they’re made to wait for an IT engineer to arrive and fix their issue, they’ll be wasting energy while they wait. But an effective remote IT support provider be able to get to the user very quickly and minimise their downtime. Another example is, if your business uses Cloud hosting, your remote IT support provider can optimise your Cloud usage to be more data and energy efficient.

Take the Right Steps to Make Your Business Eco-Friendly with Technology

New technology can be very important for many reasons. One overlooked benefit of IT technology is that it can actually be very good for the environment! Your company should invest in IT solutions that lower your carbon footprint and overall waste. You will go a long way towards helping save the planet.