Green IT - Overview

Summary

Environmental awareness is on the rise throughout society, and companies are coming under increasing pressure to consider their activities' environmental impact and reduce this wherever possible. A key component for most companies is the concept of Green IT. While processes may have been put in place to improve elements such as purchasing management or the reduction of printing, companies do not necessarily have a clear view of their Green IT maturity through factual measures. Using Nexthink technologies, you can estimate your Windows laptops' energy consumption and CO2 emissions; you can also see your macOS devices' energy settings and visualize the areas of high energy consumption in your data center and storage infrastructure.

This pack will identify key settings or behaviors that can significantly affect the overall energy consumption of a department or company. These include identifying devices that are either set up with an energy-intensive power plan, running excessively, or even continuously. These three behaviors are grouped into an overall “improvement” score as they can be easily addressed.

Using Nexthink Engage, a Green IT “quiz” will help you gauge the environmental awareness of your employees, and to help you reduce your overall emissions, targeted educational reminders can be sent to those employees exhibiting specific behaviors, such as never turning off a laptop.

Score

This pack includes a score file containing four elements.

The first is a standalone calculation for machines over three years old with a DEX Device score of more than 7. This identifies devices that may ordinarily be ready for replacement but can be retained if they still function well.

The three remaining elements are part of an overall score for “Best practices improvement”:

Devices always running
Devices running excessively
Bad Power Plan

Campaigns

There are three campaigns included in this pack:

Green IT Quiz
Power Plan Education
Shut Down Education

The Quiz is a set of three questions to help gauge your employees' knowledge of Green issues. The detailed responses to the questions are designed to be informative, and links to the source material for each fact are included.

The other two campaigns are designed to be sent to targeted employees who may need education on green issues. The Power Plan Education campaign can be sent to all employees whose device is running a High-Performance power profile. The Shut Down Education campaign can be sent to all employees whose device is either running excessively or all the time.

Remote actions

There are seven remote actions included in this pack:

Get Battery Status
- Note: This Remote Action is for both macOS and Windows.
Get MS Office Information
- Note: This Remote Action is for Windows only.
Get OneDrive Information
- Note: This Remote Action is for both macOS and Windows.
Get Power Plan
- Note: This Remote Action is for macOS only.
Get User Folder Size
- Note: This Remote Action is for Windows only.
Get Consumption Information
- Note: This Remote Action is for Windows only.
- Additionally, this remote action retrieves energy consumption data directly from Microsoft's powercfg.exe tool.
Set Power Plan
- Note: This Remote Action is for Windows only.

Get Consumption Information can be run against all Windows devices containing a battery, typically laptops.

The power consumption of the following elements is estimated using data from Microsoft’s powercfg.exe tool:

CPU
Disk
Display
Network

The estimated energy consumption is displayed in Watt-hours (Wh) instead of kilowatts due to the potentially small energy consumption measures involved. This remote action contains a parameter for the ratio of Watt-hours per Kg CO2. A generic value for Western Europe (0.3) is pre-configured and displayed on the dashboard. Please be aware that this ratio can vary dramatically from region to region, depending on how power is generated there. For more information, please refer to the configuration guide.

Dashboards

Device Optimization

This dashboard is concerned with device configurations that can directly or indirectly affect an organization's energy consumption.

Best practice

This section measures device settings or employee habits that directly affect a device's power consumption. These are:

Devices always running (>5 days continuously)
Devices running excessively (>40 hours )
Devices running a bad power plan (High Performance)

Further Opportunities

This section highlights areas where an organization’s energy consumption could be improved but in more long-term or indirect ways than the measures above, such as device lifecycle extension, greener device purchasing, or the reduction of redundant under-utilized devices.

macOS

This section shows the results of the “Get Power Plan” remote action specific to macOS devices.

Device Consumption

This dashboard shows the results of the “Get-Consumption Info” remote action that can be run against all Windows devices containing a battery, typically laptops.

The power consumption of the following elements is measured:

CPU
Disk
Display
Network

The energy consumption is displayed in Watt-hours (Wh) instead of kilowatts due to the potentially small energy consumption measures involved.

Infrastructure

This dashboard is concerned with the energy consumed by your IT infrastructure, namely:

Servers that can be decommissioned from your data center
Outlook storage files
OneDrive storage folders

Employee Awareness

This dashboard displays the campaign " Quiz " results included in this pack. The responses to the questions are shown, together with the overall responsiveness ratio. Below, the average energy consumption of campaign respondents is displayed to see if there is any difference in behavior between employees who are or are not aware of green issues.