IT teams play a key role when it comes to going green

Research from Paessler AG, the IT monitoring specialist, highlights attitudes towards sustainability in IT departments across the globe and reveals the important part that IT can play in the move to go green.

Energy efficiency, sustainability and environmental concerns are high on the agenda for IT teams. In fact, eight in 10 (80%) of respondents agree that sustainability is either very or quite important to their overall business agenda. 

Out of those surveyed, the top three countries that ranked the highest when it comes to sustainability being very important to their business agenda are:

• France (40%)

• Canada (39%)

• The UK and USA ranked joint third (37%)

IT teams working in manufacturing are the most aware of how important sustainability is to their business (71%) in comparison to other industries. Those working in finance and financial services (55%), government and education (41%) ranked second and joint third in the research.

When asked about where IT can have the biggest impact when it comes to making businesses more environmentally friendly, the top three responses by IT teams around the world are:

• Only using the necessary hardware (45%)

• Using smart building technology (i.e. IoT devices and sensors) to reduce energy usage (39%)

• Moving to the cloud and using renewable energy providers (39%) ranked joint third

Over a third (37%) of IT teams said that they have already started to make changes when asked about whether they had begun to implement new sustainable IT strategies into the business. While it is encouraging to see some companies making an effort to tackle climate change, over a quarter (27%) admit that it isn't a priority at the moment. This may be explained by the fact that company resources might be dedicated to recovering from the economic downturn following the pandemic.

Martin Hodgson, Country Manager UK and Ireland at Paessler AG: “Whilst it’s clear from our findings that companies know that they need to do more to become more sustainable and environmentally friendly, there isn’t a sense of urgency. Only 16% of IT teams who hadn’t yet implemented new sustainable IT strategies into the business intend to make changes in the next year.  Monitoring can play an important role in making key decisions about energy usage and where to make improvements. By having greater visibility of where resources are being overused or under-optimised, we can help companies identify opportunities to improve their carbon footprint.”

Amid increasing digitalisation Paessler continues to look for ways to improve opportunities for its customers to use data monitoring to optimise the efficiency of their business. It is currently working on a prototype to help organisations across various industries, including IoT and IIOT scenarios to do just that.