To effectively “green” an organization’s information technology capabilities is to reduce its overall environmental impact, while continuing to provide necessary services to the enterprise.  It is a fascinating and dynamic field.

For large organizations looking to gain greater efficiencies through and from their IT investment, the possibilities can be overwhelming.  Virsant is a comprehensive consultancy, and as such we offer the following quick primer to outline the options available.

Office Printing Management: Printing waste represents a common and vexing problem for enterprise organizations. Virsant partner solutions are designed and built for large, complex IT environments to dramatically reduce enterprise printing waste and its associated costs. Our solution helps end-users identify and eliminate unwanted pages before they are sent to the printer, reducing paper, ink and toner consumption. Large organizations save an average of 17% of total enterprise printing expense, which equates to roughly $75 per user per year. The product is easy to deploy, requires little active IT management, and has an ROI of less than 6 months.

Desktop PC and Laptop integrity: Virsant partner Faronics has installed millions of copies of Deep Freeze, and incredibly useful utility that makes computers indestructible and prevents against unwanted workstation changes—regardless of whether they are accidental or malicious. Deep Freeze is proven to reduce helpdesk support incidents by up to 40% and allows IT personnel to focus on more strategic IT needs. Virsant staff has solid experience with deploying Deep Freeze on public facing computers, as well as one “office” systems where user data can be properly secured during re-imaging.

Desktop Power Management: Desktop computers consume millions of kilowatts of energy every day, much of that while not in active use. Virsant has hands-on experience with the Power Save utility from Faronics, and consistently see PC energy consumption can be reduced by 60% with this application.  Intelligent desktop power management solutions like Power Save allows companies to minimize energy usage by putting computers into power saving modes while inactive. This is one of the easiest, least intrusive Green IT solutions available.

E-cycling: According to the EPA, recycling 1 million desktop computers prevents the release of greenhouse gases equivalent to the annual emissions of over 17,000 passenger cars. Recycling centers that specialize in recovering the valuable materials in electronics, and properly disposing of hazardous waste exist in most cities.

Carbon-Neutral Service Providers: You may not be able to power your computers with solar cells on the roof or wind turbines in the parking lot, but you can obtain key business services from providers who use renewable energy. For example, your business can use a telecom service that boasts net-zero environmental impact.