3 Reasons to Adopt as a Service Models for IT Sustainability

[LPEditor]

Business leaders must focus not just on how to survive, but how to thrive in a technology-driven, COVID world. Rethink the way you consume IT to achieve your business and sustainability objectives in this values-driven era.

The unprecedented disruption of COVID-19 hasn’t fettered interest in sustainable business. In fact, environmental and social issues have become interconnected with a heightened demand for digitalization and greater sense of global responsibility. Companies that prioritize sustainable practices have an opportunity to capitalize on these market forces, with 85% of environmental, social, governance (ESG) equity indices outperforming non-ESG peers in the first quarter of 2020.

As the pandemic accelerates digital transformation across industries—from e-commerce to remote workforces—organizations have been forced to find new ways to increase efficiencies and reduce costs in order to overcome economic challenges and scale their digital backbones.

Herein lies a new opportunity to build sustainability considerations into your digital agenda by rethinking the way you procure and consume IT. The adoption of as-a-service models enables organizations to scale within their existing resource limitations by eliminating inefficiencies, yielding both financial and environmental savings.

Alongside the flexibility and control provided through as-a-service models are often-overlooked environmental benefits, helping enterprises meet their business and sustainability goals concurrently. This is at the core of HPE GreenLake Cloud Services and our transition into an as-a-service company by 2022.

Here are three reasons to shift to an as a service model today:

1. Eliminate overprovisioning to achieve more with less equipment

Many enterprises struggle with on-premises capacity planning with storage and compute overprovisioned by ~50%, on average. These inefficiencies result in redundant CapEx and OpEx costs, as well as power, space, and cooling constraints that can prevent you from fully implementing a digital solution. Adopting as-a-service models can overcome the root causes of overprovisioning in your infrastructure by right-sizing your IT and offering instantly deployable buffer capacity.

By eliminating overprovisioning, HPE GreenLake customers can benefit from 30% CapEx savings[1]; not to mention the avoided costs from depreciating, idling equipment that drain your budgets with needless energy consumption, maintenance agreements, and licensing. And the potential to dematerialize your infrastructure can be  magnified further when delivering efficient solutions, such as composable infrastructure, as a service.

2. Optimize your assets to reduce energy costs

Overprovisioning goes hand-in-hand with low utilization, another common symptom of inefficient IT. Industry-wide utilization levels are still estimated to be around just 25%.[2] All of our as-a-service offerings are backed by metering and reporting tools that give customers insight into their consumption and utilization with a unified view—whether it's gigabytes of storage, compute hours, or VMs—to ensure they only pay for what they consume.

Consuming IT as a service also takes the burden of IT lifecycle management off your hands while ensuring you get the latest technologies, which typically consume 20-30% less power than the previous generation.[3] Tech refresh can avoid the performance lags and inefficiencies in energy and space consumption often inherent in outdated data center technology. Research by the Uptime Institute found that aging servers more than three years old makeup 40% of the installed base yet perform less than 7% of the work while consuming 66% of the power![4] And a separate IDC study found that, with a three-year refresh cycle, each refreshed server resulted in operational cost savings of $76,000 compared to continuing to run the older server.[5] It's time for IT organizations to switch to as-a-service models to unlock the energy and cost savings opportunities of optimized server refresh cycles.

3. Embrace a circular economy to maximize asset value

Finally, HPE GreenLake assumes that assets will be retained by the provider at end-of-use, enabling HPE to extend the life of retired IT equipment and improve the utilization of resources by reusing and remanufacturing components for a second life.

As you transition your infrastructure, it is also important to remember that every IT asset is invested capital. Decommissioning inefficient legacy assets through a refurbishment service like HPE Asset Upcycling can return the residual value of these assets back to your bottom line, while reducing carbon emissions and keeping e-waste out of landfills. 

IT departments can now play a more active role in advancing their enterprise’s sustainability strategy by shifting to a hybrid cloud model under HPE GreenLake. The COVID-19 pandemic has stress-tested the case for sustainable IT, demonstrating that enterprises driving digital transformation initiatives must adopt an environmentally sustainable solution aligned to their business objectives in order to succeed.

Get started on the path to a sustainable digital transformation today:

• Contact HPE’s sustainability and IT efficiency technologists
• Learn more about HPE GreenLake Cloud Services
• Learn more about HPE sustainability leadership

Living Progress
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

[1] "The total economic impact of HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity", Forrester Consulting, May 2020

[2],[4] "Beyond PUE: Tackling IT's wasted terawatts", Uptime Institute, 2020

[3] Based on server performance data from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC)

[5] "Accelerate business agility with faster server refresh cycles", IDC, 2017