Posted on Thursday, July 7, 2016 in CSR, Data
Historically the CTO has been only had to meet the capacity demands of the business and its users. But the joined-up enterprise has a range of strategic goals that encompass every department.
Among these new targets are those designed to help your organization operate in a more ethical way. Environmentally friendly credentials are seen as a key differentiator for large firms, with brands like Apple and Microsoft keen to emphasise their efforts to reduce waste, and minimize their impact on the natural world.
The rise of CSR targets creates new headaches
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) efforts mean that every employee is duty bound to help shrink the company’s carbon footprint, and reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill. As IT is one of the largest consumers of electricity within the business, these targets create a major problem for the CTO.
With service users demanding additional processing power and storage capacity, reducing energy consumption seems to be at odds with the company CSR strategy. But there are ways to minimize increases, primarily through better use of your existing assets.
Upgrading is the environmental choice
Rather than replacing existing hardware and sending older units to landfill, the environmental option is to upgrade them to their maximum potential capacity. Taking this approach has a number of benefits:
- Upgrades are invariably cheaper than completely new systems, freeing up budget for reinvestment on other projects.
- Keeping hardware in circulation for longer increases the return on investment, reduces the total cost of ownership, and prevents equipment being sent to landfill sooner than is absolutely necessary.
- Post warranty hardware can be used to replace older, even less energy efficient equipment and provide a performance/capacity boost.
The more of your assets you can keep in circulation, the closer you will get to reaching your CSR targets.
Safe disposal
When your assets finally fail to deliver the performance you need, the way in which hardware is disposed of is also important for your CSR targets. The more that you can recycle, the lighter the impact on the environment.
Electronic components contain various harmful substances (lead, cadmium, rare metals) that need to be disposed of safely. So you need to partner with a responsible business capable of arranging ecologically sound recycling and disposal of IT hardware.
So the next time your business renews its CSR targets, the CTO must focus on upgrades and recycling if they are going to achieve the kind of reductions that deliver genuine environmental benefits.
To learn more about upgrading and managing post-warranty hardware, or arranging for safe, secure hardware recycling, please get in touch.
– See more at: http://www.cds.net/news/2016/07/csr-targets/#sthash.n3PXN9Xv.dpuf