As Central Texas faces yet another summer of blistering heat, the increased energy demands on your facility are likely to cost plenty even without factoring in your IT system’s electrical consumption. If you want to improve your control over this operational expense, maybe you should start by looking at ways to optimize your technology’s energy efficiency. Here are some helpful tips from your Austin IT managed services team at Gravity Systems.

Stop storing and duplicating unneeded data. Yes, regular data backup and secure data storage are critical routines for any IT system. But these steps inevitably consume energy, so you don’t want to be expending that energy on data that you’ve already backed up sufficiently, or data that you don’t even really need anymore. Prune away this excess data or consign it to archival storage so you don’t have to keep expending energy on it.

Take Advantage of PoE. Power over Ethernet (PoE) devices have one great advantage for any organization trying to save electricity -- they allow you to manipulate their energy consumption by selecting power-saving settings at the application level. You probably already have PoE devices in your network, so take a look at their energy settings and adjust them to suit your needs.

Replace Hard Drives With SSDs. Solid state drives (SSDs) have no moving parts, so they naturally don’t draw as much power as old-school hard drives. You don’t have to trash all your hard drives in favor of SSDs at one go, but you can make a policy of making SSDs your go-to choice when replacing failing hard drives.

Outsource power-consuming functions. The less IT work you’re actually doing on site, the less energy that work will consume. Ask our team about cloud-based and remote IT service options that can help keep your electric bill down -- while keeping your productivity up!