Every day is "Earth Day" with SaaS!

Especially today, on Earth Day, we celebrate positive trends in the direction of Green IT, specifically…. the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Model!

Typically IT is not very green. It consumes a fair amount of power and it’s our increasing reliance on technology that is largely blamed for global warming.  With that in mind, some IT architecture models are more energy efficient than others, and adoption of the SaaS model is definitely a step in the right direction. 

Enter SaaS. Clearly SaaS saves a lot of energy by more efficiently using computing resources and reducing carbon dioxide emissions.  Consumers worldwide are beginning to realize just how much centralized processing and a shared services model contribute to a smaller carbon footprint!

In addition, SaaS centralizes data center operations to use less equipment and a small fraction of the supporting facility costs….which means less costs associated with servers and their accompanied maintenance/upkeep. In a time when "going green" is high on many companies' priority lists, SaaS provides a great way to improve business processes on both fronts.

IT folks should sleep well at night knowing their SaaS applications are helping to save Mother Earth. Whoever said it's not easy being green...

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PM World Today explained the whole thing very nicely in an article published in February 2009:

Less Fossil Fuels

SaaS solutions enable telecommuting. This means that you no longer have employees wasting fuel by driving to work and getting stuck in traffic. With SaaS solutions, you can work in your home, a coffee shop, or your local bookstore. All you need is a wireless laptop and a cell phone. More choice in your work environment also leads to smoother relations with colleagues and less stress in your life.

Less Energy

SaaS allows the sharing of resources, like carpooling. Instead of one server in your company serving one population of users sporadically, an equivalent server can sit in the data center of a SaaS provider and serve multiple companies worldwide, taking advantage of the inevitable low activity during the night in the U.S. to provide service to European or Asian customers. Computers use energy whether they're active or idle, so the computer in your company's server closet is wasting energy at night. SaaS servers are not as wasteful of energy in this regard.

Less Landfill Waste

Consolidating servers is not just about saving energy. Consider the fact that every computer that is bought eventually ends up as waste and this waste is pretty toxic.

Less Paper

SaaS solutions often provide an application program interface, making integrations to accounting and other automated systems a snap. These integrations avoid environmentally damaging paper document creation and processes that are based on human resources and therefore error-prone.

                                                                                                Source: Published in PM World Today – February 2009