Green IT Solutions - Environmentally Friendly IT

NEC actively supports a Green IT agenda under two broad headings:

Infrastructure improvements

IT and Communications equipment generate excessive energy consumption in terms of:
- The core equipment itself
- Facilities needed to house this equipment
- Maintenance of this core equipment

The growing needs of organisations for newer, more innovative, increasingly powerful solutions, bring with it a need to add further processing power or capacity... often incrementally rather than by replacement. Tactical addition of hardware, rather than strategic replacement, is often dictated by budgetary constraints. Additional machines consume more power directly as well as indirectly (by requiring more management and maintenance overhead and utilising more space). Organisations can make a contribution to the impact to the environment as well as to their financial well-being by considering a number of infrastructure improvements:

- Use of software infrastructure in preference to hardware infrastructure
- Reducing the quantity of servers in data centres
- Reducing the energy footprint of personal computers
- Centralising and sharing processing

Business process change

Organisations are under pressure to improve workplace performance but need to adapt underlying business processes. Inefficiencies (as well as their environmental impact) can be addressed by: Streamlining communications, reducing or avoiding business gridlock Using modern conferencing and collaborative tools to prevent unnecessary travel.