With Green IT against climate change and high energy costs
According to Gartner, industrial CIT accounts for 2% of global CO2 emissions. That means it pollutes the environment to the same extent as global air traffic. Swisscom IT Services operates more than 80,000 IT workstations and nearly 6,000 servers in its own data centres. For Swisscom IT Services as one of the leading Swiss IT service providers, this entails a huge ecological responsibility.
Green IT is much more than just environmentally-friendly waste disposal
An ecologically responsible approach begins long before considering the environmentally friendly disposal of outdated hardware. Even during the development phase, steps must be taken to ensure the environmental compatibility of IT products. Consequently, Swisscom IT Services consistently considers important environmental aspects across the complete lifecycle of hardware components. The focus is on the following points:
- When purchasing hardware, we prefer to work with suppliers who develop and manufacture their products in a sustainable and environmentally sound way.
- We focus on hardware that is particularly energy efficient to operate.
- We ensure environmentally friendly disposal of outdated hardware components.
Environmental aspects and energy efficiency in the operation of data centres
Environmental issues and energy efficiency have high priority in our data centres. In our new data centre in Zollikofen, we have reduced our cooling power requirements by up to 13% thanks to consistent optimisation of the IT infrastructure and the cooling systems. Which means that cooling now account for less than 20% of the data centre's total power requirements. When the outside temperature is below 15 degrees, the IT systems are directly cooled by a fresh air cooling system. Using heat recovery, we use a portion of the lost heat for heating, cooling and providing hot water. The infrastructure is prepared in such a way that the lost heat from our data centre can also be used by potential consumers.
Our commitment to environmental protection
As part of Swisscom, we are committed to fulfilling our corporate responsibility towards the environment in a consistent and proactive manner. We are certified in accordance with the environmental management standard ISO 14001 and source a substantial amount of eco-energy ("naturemade star") from local hydroelectric power stations, as well as wind turbines and photovoltaic plants. What's more, we only use environmentally friendly paper.
Swisscom IT Services' commitment helps ensure an improved environmental balance for its customers, as well as helping Swisscom meet its own environmental policy standards.