As I sit at my desk writing this, world leaders are meeting in Glasgow to discuss ways of limiting the average global temperature rise due to greenhouse gasses to 1.5 degrees. Even at this level we may expect to see significant changes to the natural world; loss of species, death of coral reefs, parts of the world becoming uninhabitable and certainly more extreme weather events. Arguably, we are already seeing these changes. Human beings have clearly reached a level of “sophistication” where we are quite capable of destroying ourselves as well as the world in which we live.
Technology is part of the problem. As we have hurtled forward into the digital age we have left in our wake a trail of obsolescence and environmental harm. Waste electronic components buried in landfill, massive holes in the ground where we have mined for raw materials, forests we have levelled to build our factories and of course huge volumes of greenhouse gasses.
But technology has also delivered countless benefits. We have discovered new ways to control disease and care for each other. Data science founded on high performance computing has enabled scientific insights that we never could have imagined just thirty years ago. We have worked together as a community to manage the most significant pandemic the world has seen in a hundred years; built new platforms to keep families together, keep businesses running and deliver remote health services. Knowledge has become democratised and we now deliver a vast array of information services to huge audiences. We have built new economies.
We can recover
World leaders are meeting in Glasgow to negotiate and plan a political and economic model they hope will save the world from catastrophic warming. However, businesses also need to show leadership and many are already restructuring and building towards a greener future. Investment funds are refocusing on ethical investments, recycling is gaining momentum and “green” products are entering the market. Companies from Apple to Bank Australia are developing credible “green” strategies and have recognised that more and more their customers are demanding a “green” product. At COP26, the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is telling the world “We can restore world’s forests” and in Australia businesses like Bank Australia and OfficeWorks are planting trees.
Consumers and Businesses are leading the “green recovery” and Governments around the world are moving to establish the foundations and structures necessary to support a green economy.
Computing, Data Centres and Carbon Neutrality
As a technology business Incarta consumes significant resources to power our infrastructure. In order to reduce our environmental footprint we are actively developing programs and strategies to minimise our power consumption. Over the last twelve months we have upgraded more than half our servers to operate with solid state disks rather than the traditional mechanical disk drives. In addition to providing faster data access, solid state drives are more reliable and use significantly less power than mechanical drives. This has enabled us to double our storage capacity whilst slightly reducing power consumption. However, the most significant development has been that our data centre provider Next DC has introduced “NextNetural”, a carbon offset program that has enabled us to run on 100% carbon offset electricity. This is very significant as it means that our entire infrastructure and any services our clients host with us are guaranteed to run on 100% carbon offset electricity. This is something to be proud of and we are excited to be benefiting from the environmental program being offered by Australia’s most progressive data centre operator.
If the environment is important to you, your business and your clients and if you want to do your part to build a better greener tomorrow then host with us, backup your data to our S3 storage with Asigra, compute your analytics on our private cloud, deploy our cloud EMR Alarta or maybe ask us to build your new web service and keep it all carbon neutral. Share your “green” credential with your clients and together we can build towards a safer, greener tomorrow.
Incarta has commenced a journey to reduce our carbon footprint and over the next twelve months we will be reviewing all aspects of our business from server supply chains to back office functions. We hope you will join us and consider how your business can be a change for good.
