You’ve heard the pronouncement: We need to Go Green! Whether it came from a CxO coming back from a golf outing with his/her leprechaun buddies or from a more serious source, Going Green is a concept worthy of serious consideration. My advice? Yes, take all the steps that make sense for your business.
This article is specifically on how SaaS may be some of those steps in your data center. In fact, you may find that looking at SaaS as an alternative to on-premises solutions has your seeing green anyway. You have seen some of the recommendations on how to “Greenify.” Some are workable and some are straight out of Scott Adam’s “pointy haired boss” in the Dilbert cartoon series: “Turn off the servers at night to save electricity.” (I kid you not.)
You’ve probably been moving to blade or virtual servers to consolidate services on fewer boxes anyway. That is certainly steps to reduce the data center’s carbon footprint. But, some of those new blade racks consume their share of power and demand more cooling. At some point, you can’t reduce the carbon footprint of your data center any further without reducing services. Or can you?
Can you delegate some of the services to a Managed Service or SaaS provider and get them out of your data center altogether? What would that look like? What processes could you delegate without losing security or processing power?
Here are some suggestions: