and do we really care?

I was in my car earlier today listening to Radio 2 (I'm at that age, and my car runs on LPG if anyone is interested) when a discussion between Steve Wright and his colleagues were discussing how low profile green awards are in this country. And I agree with them.

But it got me thinking. I do my bit for the environment which I suppose includes me converting my car to LPG but I did that because I was fed up with mad petrol prices. As a business we recycle paper but here in Suffolk the Council does no special metal and plastic collections for business, only for domestic customers, which incidentally only constitutes about 5% of overall waste.

In all my time in I.T. I have NEVER had an enquiry from any organisation looking for green solutions. Never.

The nearest I suppose we come to it is with providing remote access solutions for companies who have a remote or mobile work force. It means that sales staff for example don't have to travel back to base camp to upload orders and sales reports. But the driver here is more about getting the most out of staff time than anything green. The effect may be similar, that is to say less miles on the road, but it really equates to less time traveling to the office to do something you could do at home, on their time, not yours. Makes sound business sense to me which is why my colleagues all have the ability to work away from the office which includes a "softphone" running on their PC's which means that they are on the company switchboard.

More recently we have been gearing up ourselves for the provision of applications running on VMWare, virtual servers. Secure Computing are gradually enabling all of their systems over to VMWare, these include SecureFirewall (Sidewinder as was), SecureMail (IronMail) and SecureWeb (WebWasher). This means in theory that you the end user will be able to dispense with many appliances and consolidate to virtual servers thus saving space, electricity, staff and money. Is this green? Well I suppose if computer rooms need less air-conditioning, less power and few people to look after them, then YES.

So what's my point?

Having given this more thought I recommend that you encourage staff to work from home using Juniper SecureAccess and Aladdin Tokens to access internal resources through virtual servers housing Secure Computing SecureFireWall.

If you'd like to find out more about being green whilst remaining absolutely secure, then please contact us today.