One of the biggest concerns of many businesses is achieving a more sustainable future. Most recognize that the impact they have on the world needs to be minimized to reduce carbon emissions and lower the potential impact of climate change. Technology is key to this, including using advanced renewables, smarter electricity and lower-emission transportation where possible.
Yet there are other means of reducing their impact, and unified communications is a key one.
The Impact of Commuting
Commuting is a huge waste of time and energy for many people. And not just energy in the biological sense — with huge cities becoming heavily gridlocked at certain times of the day, millions of motorists are using fuel just to sit in traffic.
In a 2020 paper, Daniel Crow and Ariane Millot at the International Energy Agency noted that if everybody able to work from home, globally, did so for one day a week, annual emissions of carbon dioxide would decline by 24 million tonnes. That’s around 56 million barrels of oil.
The same piece noted that during global lockdowns in April 2020, gasoline and diesel use went down by 15 million barrels per day.
This is, of course, an extreme example — the world heavily restricted travel, and that meant that people stayed very local. Nonessential businesses closed, which meant that many service-oriented companies didn’t travel to see clients unless the journey was deemed essential.
Businesses that could adapt did so rapidly. Remote working became the norm during lockdown, and it continued at an elevated pace even when the world returned to a more normal state.
And that required unified communications.
How Much Does Residential Energy Use Rise?
One of the oft-repeated arguments is that with remote working, residential energy use rises. And that’s true — to a point. After all, if you’re not using lights and heating in an office, you’re using the same at home.
The difference is that you do not have to drive a vehicle to get to work.
Realistically, if you have solar panels on your roof, you’re not going to be using a significant amount of additional energy most of the time. Within the UK, for example, measuring the input of 15,000 households over the weekday and weekend at different times of year yielded near-identical results for each day, with a slight increase in weekend use during the winter.
Overall, these increases are generally smaller than having to heat and cool entire offices. And although there is a small financial impact on the employee, this is usually offset by the lack of commute.
Cloud Computing: How Energy Intensive Is it?
It’s no secret that unified communications as a service uses cloud computing services, and these tend to require a large amount of energy. But how much do they need? After all, there’s no point in merely shifting energy use to another country or a large outsourced platform.
But there’s good news, in a way. By 2025, cloud computing data centers are predicted to use 20% of the world’s electricity while producing just 5.5% of global carbon emissions. This makes them vastly more effective than local servers in an office building (often one that’s poorly designed for handling server racks).
And not all data centers are equal.
Amazon has already achieved a 100% renewable energy match across all its operations worldwide — including its data centers, as of July 2024. This is the provider that Wildix uses, mainly for its impressive architecture and commitment to efficiency and global redundancy.
Azure (Microsoft’s offering), on the other hand, is making progress, but its target is 2030 for 100 percent renewables across its locations, and Google Cloud has been matching since around 2019.
There’s a catch here: matching. Amazon, Google and Microsoft do not use energy solely generated through renewable energy. Instead, they buy renewable energy certificates (RECs), which financially support green energy generation. It’s a useful (and legal) tool, but it does make the actual impact harder to discern.
However, many smaller companies don’t have the same access to these certificates, and they certainly do not have the same level of renewable energy use. They also don’t often invest the same amount into actual projects — Amazon routinely installs large amounts of solar panels across its organization to reduce the energy impact of its operations.
Overall, the actual impact of cloud computing is heavily mitigated, depending on the cloud provider used. Compared to an on-premises solution, the energy saved could be as much as 93% according to a Microsoft report.
Making Other Processes More Efficient
One essential advantage of unified communications is that it can make numerous processes much more efficient across the organization, reducing the intensity of them. As a simple example, for a helpdesk, the original process is:
- Get a call
- Verify the call with the database (new application)
- Move over to the helpdesk (new application)
- Record the information
- Solve or escalate as needed
- End the call
- Repeat
Every time a new application is opened, it makes the call last longer — because people have to rethink about what they’re seeing, adjust to a new interface and correct any mistakes that they make as a result of copying information to a different interface (and misclicks).
Alternatively, unifying everything to a single interface makes life much easier. A click to accept the call, and you can type everything into the interface directly. This can automatically get copied to your helpdesk software — or you can integrate your communications into your helpdesk. Either way, it reduces switching between screens and the time it takes to handle each call. More efficiency leads to more calls handled per person, reducing equipment and therefore the energy used.
Then there’s advanced analytics. One recurring issue many of our partners used to face is that they can’t get advanced analytics from their current platforms. This means that end-users struggle to allocate resources effectively, leading to dead time or periods where it’s simply too busy. Wildix’s analytics can help you pinpoint high demand and deliver better results, limiting unproductive employee time.
Overall, it’s an effective way to maximize the resources you have at your disposal.
The Future of UCaaS and Energy Efficiency
Global energy use has trended up, despite efforts to reduce it. However, renewables, hydropower and nuclear are all making some impact, although oil, gas and coal remain the biggest sources of energy production.
As AI starts to demand more cloud computing time, it’s clear that energy use will continue to increase, especially as businesses work out how to use AI tools in their processes. Against that, there’s a huge push toward net zero, and this will likely force companies and countries to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.
So it’s important to consider how unified communications will impact overall net zero targets, many of which are signed into law — especially across the EU and UK.
Naturally, moving to a work-from-home (or even just a hybrid model) will help reduce overall carbon costs, but there are other things to consider.
Over the next few years, unified communications vendors will have to start considering their supply lines and how they source their products and build their services. These will eventually have to become low-carbon or carbon-neutral as much as possible, especially if they want to be involved in governmental contracts. For MSPs, it pays to review who are the companies who have a history of moving with the times and who do not.
Energy Efficiency and UCaaS: How It Ties Together
Unified communications as a service makes it easier to reach green goals through its reduced reliance on centralized offices, commuting and even the very processes that your business has. As a result, it can help you build a less impactful footprint, even if not everything can be reduced. If you can reduce office space, build more flexible and impactful work systems and ensure people can work from home, your business can help reach its sustainability goals and deliver the world you want to see for the future.
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