Overcome Data Collection Hurdles to Empower Sustainable IT

In the quest to reach sustainability goals, organizations are discovering a powerful ally in their IT departments. IT can play a pivotal role in curbing resource and energy consumption, thereby reducing carbon emissions, minimizing e-waste, and shrinking an organization’s environmental footprint. These sustainability efforts not only benefit the planet but also contribute to a healthier bottom line.

However, the path to implementing sustainable IT is fraught with challenges, and one of the most pressing is the issue of data collection. In this blog, let’s delve into the complexities of data collection in the context of sustainable IT and introduce a compelling solution: Unified observability, bolstered by Aternity Digital Experience Management (DEM).

The data collection dilemma

Effective data collection is the linchpin of sustainable IT solutions. Data empowers informed decision-making by providing insights into resource consumption and environmental impact. Also, it facilitates benchmarking, identifies optimization opportunities, and ensures the efficient allocation of resources for impactful sustainability initiatives. Additionally, organizations can leverage data to promote transparency, behavioral change, and compliance while enabling continuous improvement in the pursuit of greener IT practices.

Without robust data collection, the path to sustainable IT would lack direction and the means to measure and enhance environmental impact. However, collecting data is challenging for several reasons, including:

• Data fragmentation: Data spread out across an array of platforms complicates the process of consolidating data into a unified and coherent format.
• Compatibility issues: Cloud-based and on-premises systems often use different technologies and standards, making collection hard.
• Data security and privacy concerns: Different data sources may have varying levels of security measures and privacy regulations, complicating collection.
• Data volume and velocity: Managing and processing large amounts of data in real time can overwhelm infrastructure and lead to performance bottlenecks.
• Data consistency and quality: Data from diverse sources may not always adhere to the same standards of consistency and quality.
• Resource and expertise constraints: Building the infrastructure and expertise needed to aggregate data from various sources can be resource-intensive.
• Scalability: Scalability challenges emerge when trying to accommodate the growing number of data sources and the increasing volume of data they generate.
• Vendor lock-in: Vendor-specific data formats and APIs can make it difficult to extract data for aggregation or to switch to alternative solutions, limiting flexibility.

Unified observability to the rescue

Unified observability is a game-changing solution to the challenge of data collection. It offers a comprehensive and real-time perspective on IT systems, facilitating informed decision-making regarding environmental impact. Here’s how it works:

• Comprehensive data foundation: Unified observability platforms meticulously collect granular, timestamped, and complete records of every event across the IT infrastructure. This data forms the bedrock for accurate decision models tied to sustainable IT initiatives.
• Actionable insights: These platforms deliver user-centric, actionable insights with relevant context to the right stakeholders, enabling organizations to identify areas with the most significant impact potential.
• Intelligent automation: Unified observability platforms leverage AIOps to provide expert decision-making and automation, resolving issues proactively before they escalate into incidents. This streamlines sustainable IT initiatives, enhancing operational efficiency and reducing the carbon footprint.

Practical applications of unified observability for sustainable IT

Unified observability isn’t just a theoretical concept; it yields tangible benefits for sustainable IT initiatives. The solution promotes energy efficiency by delivering granular insights into applications and infrastructure interaction. This empowers businesses to pinpoint inefficiencies, redundancies, and areas of over-provisioning. Also, real-time data analysis informs decisions about workload consolidation and virtualization, leading to reduced energy consumption.

The key to leveraging unified observability to drive sustainable IT lies within DEM platforms. Such solutions examine performance data and user feedback so organizations can gauge the environmental impact of routine tasks, establish sustainability benchmarks, and inspire employees to participate in sustainability initiatives.

Enhancing sustainable IT with Aternity DEM and prebuilt energy efficiency dashboards

Riverbed Unified Observability includes a mighty sidekick in the form of Digital Experience—a digital experience management solution that aggregates insights based on application and device performance data, human reactions, and benchmarking across industry peers.

Aternity DEM now features an energy efficiency dashboard that offers valuable insights by gathering and correlating detailed telemetry data from various devices. This dashboard provides a clear view of device uptime and energy-related metrics, enabling IT teams to pinpoint areas where avoidable energy consumption can be reduced. Additionally, it allows for the measurement of carbon footprint at both individual and organizational levels. By measuring uptime, IT organizations can identify opportunities to educate employees about conserving energy during idle device times.

Key features include:

• Computation of essential environmental metrics such as device uptime, electricity usage, carbon emissions, and electricity expenses.
• Granular breakdown of metrics by device usage duration, geographical location, power plan, business unit, and more.
• The flexibility to customize calculation parameters to align with specific objectives and operational requirements. This customization empowers organizations to leverage Aternity as a robust tool for embracing and advancing sustainable IT practices.

Drive positive environmental impact

Aternity DEM is at the forefront of driving positive environmental change. With its real-time insights powered by unified observability, Aternity helps organizations overcome data collection challenges to promote more energy-efficient operations. As a result, we see that sustainable IT isn’t just good for the environment, it’s good for business. Check out our white paper, The Role of Unified Observability in Sustainable IT, to take a deeper dive.