Soaring energy costs are causing many small companies to rethink their consumption and, in the worst cases, take drastic measures, such as layoffs and closing their doors. Adapting to the current climate is critical for the modern business, but sacrificing productivity, access, security, and usability isn’t necessarily required.
Simple procedures such as turning off equipment outside of business can have a massive impact on electricity consumption. Selecting what to run and when will lead to cost savings but could reduce productivity. Having to manage the estate on daily basis to turn on and off some or all devices could create unneeded pressure, extra management and reduce business output. It also must be considered that servers and business applications may require attention upon shutdown and start-up following medium to long outages.
A more pragmatic solution would be to remove the requirement to pay for power of on-site servers where necessary. Migrating to the cloud and offsetting electricity costs would massively reduce the energy bill along with providing the many benefits of a cloud-based offering; 24/7 secure access from anywhere, on any device to a hosted desktop.
A hosted solution can enable end users to connect to the cloud offering on less powerful devices, including the Citadel Connect, or reduce the performance of current devices, whilst maintaining and even increasing productivity. The hosted solution needs to be powerful, your server room doesn’t.
The nature of a hosted desktop will also allow users to work from anywhere, including home, offering the chance to reduce office hours, or even cut down on office space. Citadel hosted desktop include 30 day rolling backups as standard; another massive impact on energy savings is running and managing reliable backups.
Migrating to the cloud can provide an opportunity to simplify on-premise networking. Switches, modems, access points, controllers and more can be consolidated to smarter, less power-hungry devices. Complex and old networks can drain power and even impact performance. With a cloud solution, access to the Internet is the only networking requirement for a user.
Other considerations can have an impact on energy costs, such as reducing and removing printing or ensuring lights and other electrical devices are switched off when not required. But the biggest contributing factor to most small business is the operating cost of computers and core technologies within the office.
• On-site servers can each use anywhere between 350W to 1500W (250kWh to 1080kWh per month)
• The Citadel Connect only consumes 4W of power per device as opposed to a laptop that can range from around 20W to 50W
• Old switches can consume 400W 24 hours a day per device (288kWh per month)
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