Cost-Savings Key Driver to Green IT in Small Businesses

August 5, 2008

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Vittesh Kalambi, research analyst at Access Market International, says cost-savings is the key driver to small businesses becoming convinced about the positive outcome of Green IT.

While small businesses do not have similar scale as large businesses, they can still go green by choosing EnergyStar rated appliances, low power consuming electronics, blade servers and virtualization technologies, says Kalambi.

Here’s some Green IT initiatives small businesses could take:

– Choose energy-efficient PC. HP and IBM have begun to manufacture low power consuming servers and PCs which utilize roughly 66% of the power requirement of older systems.

– Use power-saving servers such as blade servers which provide the same computing power with much lower power utilization.

– Be more efficient in the use of computing resources. Thin clients, which uses half the energy of desktops, saves space, is easier to secure and could reduce costs due to lower IT management expenses.

– Use basic power management techniques on computers, which can result in substantial energy savings.

– Recycle. Paper waste can be minimized by double-sided printing, reusing single side printed sheets of paper and other methods. For e-waste such as electronic hardware, retailers such BestBuy have e-waste recycling program for consumers and all their stores have recycling centers for cell phones, batteries, PCs, TVs etc.

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