Maximising business value through sustainable IT infrastructure

With looming regulatory deadlines and energy costs on the rise, organisations are under increasing pressure to accelerate their sustainability strategies and technology investments.

A recent Gartner survey found that 79% of CEOs in Asia–Pacific see sustainability as a top business growth opportunity. As leaders revisit their long-term plans, it is becoming clear that environmental sustainability can often reduce costs, ensure regulatory compliance and increase resilience. Therefore, sustainability now influences every facet of an organisation, making decisions about when and how to invest in sustainable IT infrastructure more critical than ever.

The environmental advantages of sustainable data centres and cloud services are clear, but their business benefits are often underestimated. Many still approach sustainability through the lens of environmental impact, such as reducing carbon emissions and minimising waste.

Infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must go beyond meeting expectations and prove the business value of their sustainability efforts.

To fully unlock the value of sustainable IT, a mindset shift is needed. This calls for I&O leaders to align their sustainability strategy with key business outcomes, moving beyond environmental targets.

Recognising the indirect benefits — cost savings, innovation and risk management — will help position sustainable IT as a driver of competitive advantage and business resilience. This also provides much needed clarity on sustainability success by measuring progress in ways that directly impact business performance.

Maximising value while minimising waste

An effective action I&O leaders can take to benefit both the environment and their budget is to defer purchasing new equipment, as well as better manage, optimise or redeploy existing assets. One way to do this is to set maximum life cycle standards based on vendor support, reducing them only when necessary due to performance needs. Gartner research highlights that organisations not only reduce e-waste, but can achieve up to 40% in cost savings by expanding the life spans of devices.

This extends to employee technology where there’s a growing acceptance of sustainable practices. According to a Gartner survey, 75% of employees are likely to use refurbished devices for work purposes if it helps their organisation meet its sustainability goals.

Data centres are another major area where better management of existing server and storage assets can reduce waste and save money. In many organisations, server utilisation is often less than 50%, and sometimes as low as 20%. To help optimise these assets, performance management and event management solutions can be used to monitor the utilisation and efficiency of data centre infrastructure.

Golden opportunity to innovate

With Gartner predicting 40% of existing AI data centres will face operational constraints due to power availability by 2027, rethinking sustainability strategies is key. This challenge presents a golden opportunity for I&O leaders to lead the charge in innovation, new growth opportunities and the adoption of emerging technologies and business models.

For example, open telemetry platforms, which provide an open, industry standard for collecting data across IT infrastructure, should be considered to track and improve energy efficiency. It can also offer critical insights for the IT team to understand data usage patterns, which can be optimised for greater, more consistent performance of systems.

The adoption of liquid or immersion cooling technologies can also reduce energy impact, improve efficiency, reuse wasted heat and drive greater consistencies in cooling costs and performance.

Building long-term business resilience

Sustainable, long-lasting and efficient IT provides one of the most important benefits of all: business resilience.

At its core, an organisation’s IT ecosystem depends on the consumption of natural resources and the stability of global industries. Therefore, it’s important for I&O leaders to develop their sustainability strategy to account for disruptions in fluctuating energy costs and evolving challenges in supply chain and ESG mandates.

To insulate organisations from these disruptions and enable them to maintain business resilience, I&O leaders should adopt sustainable recycling and resource utilisation practices. This can include seeking lower carbon locations for hosting workloads that are not latency-sensitive and maximising the use of renewable energy sources, such as hydroelectric or fossil fuels.

*Autumn Stanish is a director analyst at Gartner focused on IT sustainability and the role of Infrastructure and Operations in corporate ESG initiatives.

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