As businesses accelerate and expand their digital operations, enterprise IT is fast becoming a major source of energy consumption and carbon emissions worldwide. Pressure is mounting, both from regulators and consumers, for companies to reduce the environmental impact of their IT infrastructures, with tech leaders such as Microsoft setting ambitious targets and timelines to cut emissions.
Fortunately, lowering your IT infrastructure’s carbon footprint does not have to mean sacrificing performance, reliability, or budget. This guide offers practical IT infrastructure carbon footprint reduction strategies your business can implement to reduce emissions while controlling costs and maximizing asset value.
Why do IT emissions matter?
Carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. This heavily drives climate change, with impacts including rising temperatures and sea levels, more frequent extreme weather events, and disruption to ecosystems and agriculture.
How does IT contribute to greenhouse gas emissions?
Enterprise IT is a significant contributor to these emissions. While servers and data centres consume large amounts of electricity to process, store, and transmit data, emerging technologies such as big data analytics and gen AI are further increasing demand for computing power. The electricity that feeds this power consumption is often generated by burning fossil fuels, resulting in carbon emissions.
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IT also generates substantial Scope 3 emissions throughout the hardware lifecycle. Manufacturing servers and other equipment is highly energy intensive, requiring resource extraction, materials processing, and semiconductor production.
Beyond manufacturing, the transportation, deployment, maintenance, and eventual disposal of IT assets also contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.
Reducing both operational energy use and the need for new hardware manufacturing can both significantly lower the overall carbon footprint of your enterprise IT.
How to measure your IT carbon footprint
Reducing your CO2 footprint begins with establishing your baseline – that is, understanding your infrastructure’s emissions today. You can achieve this by measuring several key metrics and then tracking them over time. This way, you can monitor progress, evaluate the effectiveness of your sustainability initiatives and identify opportunities for further improvement.
Metrics to track your sustainability initiatives
| Metric | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) | Measure your data center’s energy efficiency by comparing its total energy consumption with the energy used by IT equipment. A lower PUE means less energy is wasted on supporting systems such as cooling and power. |
| Greenhouse gas emissions | Measure your infrastructure’s total emissions across Scopes 1, 2, and 3, covering factors such as operational energy use and the emissions associated with manufacturing, transporting, maintaining, and disposing of equipment. |
| Energy consumption | Track how much electricity your servers, storage, networking equipment, and cooling systems use. Reducing energy consumption often lowers operational carbon emissions. |
| Hardware lifecycle | Monitor the average lifespan and replacement rate of IT assets to understand the carbon impact of your hardware refresh cycles. The longer your hardware is functional, the better. |
Reducing your IT infrastructure’s CO2 footprint: Key strategies
Once you’ve established your baseline carbon footprint, the next step is reducing it. Effective emissions reduction focuses on four key areas: extending hardware lifecycles, improving energy efficiency, adopting circular IT practices, and disposing of equipment responsibly.
The following strategies explain how each approach can help reduce your IT infrastructure’s environmental impact while maintaining performance and controlling costs.
Extending hardware life
Many businesses replace their IT servers every 3-5 years, even if they are still functional.
However, proactive IT lifecycle management and leveraging third-party maintenance can keep enterprise IT infrastructure running well beyond the manufacturer-established End-of-Support date.
Regular maintenance, timely support and repairs, and hardware and software optimization all help extend equipment life by minimizing avoidable wear and tear and resolving issues before they worsen.
Examples of lifecycle extension strategies include:
- Robust infrastructure management throughout its lifecycle.
- Replacing damaged or faulty components of IT infrastructure.
- Hardware and software optimizations.
How it helps:
Extending the lifespan of IT equipment delays the need for hardware replacements. This reduces demand for new hardware production and the Scope 3 emissions caused by manufacturing.
It also lowers demand for finite natural resources. This helps reduce the environmental impacts of resource extraction practices, including mining.
Finally, hardware lifecycle extension delays disposal and helps reduce electronic waste. Keeping equipment in use for longer means less hardware ends up in landfill, where it can release toxic substances and microplastics into the environment.
Lifecycle extension also helps businesses control costs by avoiding the CAPEX of unnecessary refreshes.
Adopting circular IT practices
Circular strategies focus on keeping IT equipment in the market, avoiding the scope 3 emissions of both new hardware manufacturing and for disposal practices. Investing in refurbished spare parts instead of new when a component needs replacing is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways of engaging in circular IT, as well as reducing your IT costs.
Refurbished parts are restored to their original condition and performance specifications, ensuring reliability while reducing the environmental impact of manufacturing new components.
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How it helps:
By incorporating refurbished spare parts into your IT maintenance and upgrade processes, you lower demand for brand-new hardware production and the emission-heavy processes it implies, as well as giving a second life to older hardware that may otherwise end up as e-waste. This in turn avoids the emissions caused by disposal.
To find out more about the IT industry’s environmental impact and the circular IT strategies to combat it, check out our Green IT guide.
Energy efficiency improvements
Improving energy efficiency is one of the most effective ways to reduce the operational carbon footprint of your IT infrastructure. This can be achieved by using cleaner energy sources, deploying more energy-efficient hardware, and optimizing how power is monitored and used across your environment.
Where possible, power your infrastructure with renewable or low-carbon energy sources such as wind, solar, hydroelectric, or nuclear energy. Growing demand for AI computing is driving major technology companies to increasingly invest in cleaner energy and more efficient, greener data centre infrastructure. For example, Microsoft has invested in nuclear power while also researching innovative cooling technologies, including underwater data centres.
Other ways to improve energy efficiency include:
- Upgrading to energy-efficient servers, storage, and networking equipment.
- Leveraging virtualization and workload consolidation to reduce the number of physical servers required.
- Installing smart energy monitoring tools to identify inefficiencies and optimize power consumption.
- Improving data center cooling through measures such as hot and cold aisle containment, free cooling where climates permit, or liquid cooling.
How it helps:
Reducing energy consumption significantly lowers the CO2 emissions associated with data center operations, particularly where electricity is generated from fossil fuels. Meanwhile, renewable and other low-carbon energy sources, such as wind and hydroelectricity, generate electricity with significantly lower GHG emissions than fossil fuels and reduce dependence on finite resources.
Optimizing cooling systems can also deliver considerable cost savings in the long term through reduced energy consumption, while ensuring operational reliability.
Hot/cold aisles allow your company to use air conditioning only where it is necessary, reducing overall energy consumption. For higher-density computing environments, liquid cooling is generally more energy-efficient than traditional air cooling because liquids transfer heat much more effectively than air, allowing cooling systems to operate with less energy.
Consider responsible disposal and recycling
When IT equipment reaches the end of its useful life, environmentally responsible e-waste disposal and asset recycling can help minimize its environmental impact.
Rather than sending unwanted IT assets to landfill, use an IT Asset Disposition service to securely decommission equipment, erase sensitive data, and determine the most sustainable solution for each asset. Depending on its condition, hardware may be:
- refurbished for reuse
- dismantled for parts
- recycled to recover valuable materials
How it helps:
Recovering and/or refurbishing components for spare parts help extend the lifecycles of other assets and reduce demand for new equipment manufacturing. Recycling also recovers valuable materials that would otherwise require energy-intensive extraction and processing, while diverting electronic waste from landfill.
On a financial level, these strategies can help businesses recover value from retired assets, reducing their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
The role of virtualization and cloud computing in carbon footprint reduction
Virtualization and cloud computing technologies have transformed enterprise tech, from performance to security and IT sustainability initiatives. Although virtualisation and AI workloads can increase demand for processing power, they also permit greater hardware utilisation and server consolidation. This reduces the need for excess infrastructure and the energy required to operate it.
Virtualized IT infrastructures allow businesses to run more applications on fewer physical servers and make more efficient use of computing resources.
Migrating to the cloud can further reduce a business’s carbon footprint. Cloud providers often operate large-scale data centres with advanced energy management, efficient cooling systems, and increasing use of renewable and low-carbon energy sources. This allows businesses to benefit from operational and energy efficiencies that may be difficult to achieve with on-premises infrastructure.
Energy efficiency strategies for cloud environments
There are several practical techniques you can use to maximize the sustainability benefits of your virtualized IT environment, while avoiding unnecessary costs and hardware strain.
- Right-size your workloads: Match your compute, storage, and memory resources to real demand to prevent excess overprovisioning and energy consumption.
- Use autoscaling: You can take advantage of automation to facilitate right-sizing, so your resources adjust themselves during periods of low utilisation.
- Shut down unused virtual machines and idle resources: These can consume power even when they are not actively working.
- Consolidate storage: Get rid of redundant or underused data to reduce storage capacity requirements and associated energy usage.
Carbon reduction checklist
Here is a handy table outlining some of the most effective and actionable carbon reduction initiatives your business can implement to reduce its emissions. Even if you can’t do them all, every action is a step in the right direction:
| Strategy | How | Tick if done |
|---|---|---|
| Lifecycle extension |
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| Circularity |
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| Energy efficiency |
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| Responsible disposal |
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How can Evernex support your IT infrastructure carbon reduction plan?
Evernex is a leading provider of Third-Party Maintenance for enterprise IT hardware, offering all the necessary support to keep your EOL and EOSL hardware performing perfectly. This contributes to lifecycle extension, reducing in turn both your IT costs and your environmental footprint.
We also provide certified, secure IT asset disposal and IT recycling services to ensure an environmentally responsible end to your hardware’s lifecycle. Meanwhile, our Buy-Back program allows you to recuperate value while supporting circular initiatives. Evernex is dedicated to balancing IT sustainability and professional excellence at every step.
Talk to an expert
How do you reduce IT carbon emissions?
You can reduce your IT infrastructure’s carbon emissions by reducing reliance on fossil fuels, implementing energy efficiency strategies, extending your hardware’s lifecycle to avoid manufacturing-related emissions, supporting circular initiatives, and consolidating your hardware through virtualization.
What is sustainable IT?
Sustainable IT is a range of IT practices that balance operational efficiency and security with environmental responsibility. Examples include energy-efficient hardware, responsible disposal, investing in refurbished spare parts to maximize the lifecycle of assets, and cooling methods such as immersion and free cooling.
Does extending hardware life reduce emissions?
Yes! By extending your IT hardware’s useful life, you avoid having to replace it unnecessarily with a new device. In turn, this reduces the demand for new hardware manufacturing, which is responsible for approximately 80% of the embodied emissions generated across an asset’s lifecycle.
How can data centers become greener?
Data centers can become more sustainable by using environmentally responsible materials, extending the lifecycle of their infrastructure, avoiding overconsumption of energy and water, and implementing monitoring tools to track metrics such as power usage, water consumption, and CO2 emissions.