Regardless of size, most companies now have a sustainability strategy. Whether it's due to good economic sense, a corporate desire to do the "right thing," an evolving business model, or adhering to government mandates, the necessity for businesses to operate in a more sustainable manner has become the topic of the day.

In the short term, most businesses look to simplify operations through the most obvious means such as adopting recycling policies, implementing energy-efficient lighting and limiting travel by allowing employees to work from home and teleconferencing. While these can have a direct and immediate impact, it is the greening of the technology within a company that can provide far more significant sustainability benefits.

According to research conducted by Gartner, Inc., energy use from servers, desktops, monitors and laptops is the largest single category of IT energy consumption in the United States, accounting for 47 percent of all IT electricity costs.

Businesses can achieve measurable reductions in energy consumption and save millions of dollars just by adhering to three simple tactics:

1. Decommission Non-Useful Servers

The global IT industry accounts for two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, an amount equivalent to the world's airline industry. Data centers account for 30 percent of these emissions, but it is the fastest growing area of IT energy use, largely driven by the proliferation of corporate and personal data and the move toward the cloud.

According to McKinsey Group, data center energy consumption is increasing by 13.8 percent annually. If left unconstrained, and current trends continue, data center GHG emissions will grow by a factor of four by 2020. At that rate, the power demands for data centers alone will become a larger cause for carbon emissions than the entire airline industry by 2020.

A rapid increase in the number of servers in a data center brings with it an administration and support overhead, and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep tabs on what every server is doing and if it is still required. This becomes even more difficult with the adoption of server virtualization technologies, with the result that servers that fall out of use can remain undetected.

When this happens, the surplus servers are not removed from the environment or re-utilized elsewhere since the IT department and the business are not aware of the fact that the servers are no longer required.

1E and the Alliance to Save Energy, a leading Washington think-tank, previously commissioned a U.S. server energy report. In one of the key findings of the report, 72 percent of data center managers in the United States said they believed that up to 15 percent of their servers, or one in six servers, were doing no "useful work" --  that is, no longer performing the tasks for which they were originally commissioned -- and could simply be decommissioned or repurposed.

With an average operational cost for each unused physical server at $4,400 per year, and each virtual server at $1,000 per year, the total cost across the IT industry of running up to one in six servers that are not doing any useful work is just under $25B per year, or $125B over five years.

Once the servers have been monitored, those identified doing non-useful work can be eliminated completely. The virtualized instances continue to run and serve the business needs exactly as required. A single server running multiple instances means the business is still served but through a smaller, more efficient, footprint.

For example, Parker Hannifin and the West Virginia Office of Technology each saved millions of dollars by decommissioning non-useful servers. Parker immediately saved an estimated $2 million in server costs and annually saves $600,000 in energy costs alone. The West Virginia Office of Technology eliminated the need for 100 software deployment servers, saving an estimated $550,000.