Usage guide: Sustainable IT
The sustainable IT library pack enables EUC teams to measure the energy consumption and carbon footprint of key elements in their IT infrastructure to identify areas of improvement and quickly provide reporting data. The library pack offers pre-configured remote actions, self-heal, and awareness campaigns to take action and drive awareness.This page will guide you through the structure of the content and how it can be used.
Ensure your library pack is configured correctly by following the steps highlighted in its configuration guide.
Pack structure
Visibility and reporting
The Sustainable IT dashbaord as the leading content for this Library pack, providing the visibility required undertand and report on the usage and impact of your digital landscape. This dashbaord is split in multiple tabs to report on some different elements of your landscape - hardware, device usage, network - as well as offering opportunities to reduce their impact.
Footprint reduction opportunities
Alongside the need to report on sustainability insight, a dashboard tab specifically provides context into areas of improvement in device usage and the application of best practises.
However, taking action on sustainable IT insights often involves "soft" remediation, as opposed to enforcing a direct fix, which relates more to awareness. This is because sustainability requires behavioral change at the end-user level.
Direct action can also be taken by forcing devices to restart or changing their power plan.
Sentiment and behavioral impact
A key method of implementing best practises and influencing employee behaviour is through the use of target engagement campaigns. These allow you to deployawareness campaigns, at the right time, to specific users identified as having inefficient device usage behaviour. The library pack inlcues a range of pre-built campaigns that be uses out-of-the-box, or edited to fit your own communication methods.
Awarenss camapigns include:
Disable screensavers
External monitor survey
Green your inbox
Measuring impact
Repurpose surplus monitors
Save energy and protect your eyes
Turn off devices
You can also measure the pulse of you end-user by surveying their perception of the importance of sustainable IT initiative in your organization. these results can the be viewed in your dashboard, alongside other key datapoints, to centralize you reporting requirements.
Use cases
Please keep in mind this is a guide and represents just some of the potential insight and actions you can take. There are many use cases and specific troubleshooting scenarios that you might uncover in your environment.
Report on the consumption and emission of your device landscape
The sustainable IT dashboard reports on the estimated consumption and emission of your device landscape. This includes:
The sum or the average over to report over a specific time frame
Changes aver time in trend line
Breakdown by devices to identify impact by model type
Breakdowns and fitlers by working location to focus on remote and/or onsite devices.
This is a key metric to provide your CSR teams with estimated consumption data if they need to report such information in annual reports.
The use of filters allows you to focus on a specific group of devices.
Consumption and emission reporting - Remote action vs uptime insight
Note that the dashboards measures consumption and emission in two differnt methodologies.
Uptime: This method estimates the consumption of a device by measuring the uptime of devices (how long they are running for in a given timeframe) and multiplying it by a energy consumption and CO2 emission factor to report on its consumption and emission.
Remote action: A remote action is ran on every Windows laptop device to retrieve the energy consumption of devices from Microsoft powecgf and converts it to CO2 emission using a pre-defined parameter.
By default, the Uptime method is reported in the summary tab as it represent the estimated consumption of every devices type and OS in your environment. The remote action method can also be found in the dashboard to focus on more granular insight from Microsoft.
Report on your hardware inventory and manufacturing footprint of your digital landscape(scope 3)
Many CSR reports now require that companies report on their scope 3 impact. For IT, this, in part, refer to the number of devices and peripherals in use and their manufacturing footprint as 80% of the total footprint of device is from its manufacturing.
The Hardware reporing tab provides a snapshot of the of the current amount of devices in your landscape and applies conversion factors to estimate the amount of resources used up (Earth, water, CO2) required to produce the devices currently in use, as well as the estimated number of trees that would be required to offset this footprint.
The tab provides additional tables breaking down devices in use by types, models, and manufacturers to facilitate the reporting of your hardware inventory in specific CSR reports. This includes additional insight such as servers and external monitors connected.
Report on and monitor network impact and traffic to data-center locations
Additional CSR reports require companies to report on the amount of network traffic they generate as these can have a footprint at scale. An estimated CO2 footprint can also be calculated and reported. This information can be broken down by end-user applications, as they are the main generator of network traffic.
Additonal information about where your data is going can be found in breakdowns of traffic by data center provider and location. Some countries and providers can have a bigger or smaller footprint and for reporting CSR needs it can be important to report on such information.
For companies who need to provide more strict network information, Intranet traffice can also be measured as these are often calculated differently.
Apply power plan best practices
May devices may run on "high" power plan unecessarily, or without even knowing it. You can detect such devices:
For Windows: displays inefficient power plans (not balanced).
For macOS: returns devices with Hibernation disabled, use 'Caffeinated' mode, or do not have a sleep policy defined. These devices can be investigated to change their policies or raise awareness.
You can trigger the remote action campaign “Set power plan” to ask usersif they want to change their power plan and, if yes, make the change automatically.
Detect devices that have not rebooted recently
A common way to consume energy necessarily is to leave your device turned when not working. You can investigat devices that have not rebooted in over a week. A trend line of the number of devices that did not reboot in at least 3 days can help highlight those devies that do not switch off their device on the weekend. The can easily be investigated and targetted for awarenss campaigns about the best practice of switching off devices.
Detect device running idle
Some devices in your landscape might be running without actual user interaction, which could be due to various reasons such as application preventing a device from turning off. If devices have been running in such an Idle state, you can investigate which and either reach out to user, for shutdown the device, or simply understand the reason why.
Reducing such devices running unecessarily can have a huge impact in reducing the overall energy consumption of your device landscape.
Reduce cloud storage impact
Detect devices that have an abnormal amount of data stored due to Outlook OST/PST files on a device and from the use of OneDrive as a cloud storage solution, which has a CO2 footprint and that, at scale, can be quite significant.
You can then take the appropriate action - other through awarenss campaigns or more company-wide actions - to reduce the amount of cloud storage and, ultimately, your footprint.
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