How do you define sustainable IT?

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Now that I'm worried about building my own company, I see sustainability as a minimum success criteria for all of us. That criteria is measured in two ways, the most important of which is to do carbon net zero by a particular point in time, without diminishing IT's ability to grow and add value to the organization. Historically, when you pushed sustainability efforts, the response was, “What's it going to cost me?” And cost doesn't have to mean spending 5 cents per kilowatt hour for green energy versus 3 cents for fossil fuel; the cost could be putting up another barrier to growth in some form.How do we create a sustainable environment where people want to come to work, and they have the tools, resources and human support from a company that keeps that flow of material strengthened and maintained? Because for the company, it's just as important as fuel is to UPS in getting its trucks around. At the same time, it’s also about directing the company to build a sustainability platform that allows it to grow and excel without a reciprocal negative impact on the environment.

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Sustainability for IT enters into the conversation in a variety of ways through a multitude of focuses. Balancing budgets while keeping the organization running from an IT perspective presents the most obvious intersection of IT and sustainability. I cannot go over budget and expect to maintain this, nor can I support sub-standard IT operations without a reasonable budget. Sustainability from a personnel perspective is more important than ever. Being proactive about avoiding burnout not only is humane, but it protects business continuity by equalizing staffing levels and retaining valuable team members. Sustainability from and environmental perspective can sometimes jive with financial sustainability, but it can sometimes be at odds. We naturally want to minimize our resource usage in terms of electricity, which lowers costs. But this can also be taken in a different way, when it comes to recycling end-of-life equipment, where there can be a cost associated with this.

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Sustainability can mean many things in the IT world. With current trends I think it closely relates to how we power and locate our data centers. The cooling of our out of date centers is one of the largest impacts my company creates to the environment. We are going to be delivering four new centers that operate completely differently and will truly make a difference to the carbon footprint of the company.

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Sustainable IT just like other sustainable objects, process, events; plays an important role in defining the IT structure of an organization. Its when one needs an holistic view of its environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts in order to measure its impact, understand how it could scale ESG programs, and communicate successes to stakeholders. Sustainable IT ratings when measured in the correct way of its understanding to ESG landscape, provides key metrics and indicators that the organization would sought, plus crucial insights into the competitive landscape, industry best practices, and opportunities to improve efficiency and grow internal talent capacity.