Data center sustainability is an increasingly important consideration for many companies. Environmental responsibility is an essential part of achieving your business’s social goals and developing a positive brand perception. Various studies show that on average 70 percent of companies consider sustainability as one of their most important business priorities.
When you think of sustainability, your mind will probably immediately jump into reducing your ecological footprint with renewable energy sources. But before you achieve this goal in the longer term, it is worth considering how your company can use less of its existing resources. By outsourcing services, you can streamline your activities and reduce the amount of energy and resources you use. Here are three ways to go to a colocation facility to address data center sustainability.
Optimize your space
Operating an internal data center puts your company at a disadvantage when it comes to sustainability. It is unlikely that your office building is specifically designed for the sustainable management of your critical IT infrastructure. Over the years, you have probably constantly added more equipment and adapted the environment to changing business needs. If you move to a facility that is specifically built to manage data on a scale, you can drastically reduce the space you use. This will also help to minimize capital expenditure and overhead costs.
Optimize your costs
How often does your data center equipment need maintenance? You waste valuable resources that can be allocated to more strategic work. If you go to an external data center, you can also benefit from centralized maintenance, so that more of your resources can be used for IT projects that have real value for your business, whether it is to develop new applications or add new functions to existing ones.
Optimize energy efficiency
One of the most important disadvantages of an internal data center is the inability to measure the power that you use correctly. Your office building is not designed to give you that information, but there is a good chance that you will use too much power even if you cannot measure it. You are probably working too hard on your infrastructure and you are investing too much in maintenance so that nothing falls over. By outsourcing your data center management you take this worry away.
A well-designed and managed data center measures your usage to provide relevant and useful insights into how your infrastructure or hosted service works. More importantly, you only pay for what you actually use, so that you can scale the solution to meet changing business needs.
Outsourcing services for sustainability
By outsourcing your data center activities, your business can become more efficient and in turn more sustainable, while you get better cloud connectivity with lower latency and much improved security. Moving your systems to the cloud gives your sustainability even more a boost, as it both reduces your footprint and hosts more IT services in highly energy-efficient data centers.
If you are a smaller company, the amount of power you use does not have a major impact, but these small changes may be part of a wider shift to sustainable energy. For larger companies, maintaining an internal data center is a challenge and complex. If you switch to a specialized hosting environment, you ensure that you do not use (or pay) more space and power than you need.
