Despite every company+dog claims to be embarking on various sustainable projects, senior leaders sometimes miss out on the most impactful initiatives.

Gartner surveyed 200 senior leaders across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Surprisingly, some of the most cost-effective sustainable IT initiatives have adoption rates of less than 30 per cent among organisations.

Gartner vice president analyst Kristin Moyer said senior leaders are making progress. However, their approaches and strategies need refinement.

The report identifies six cost-effective initiatives that senior leaders often overlook. Two of these initiatives focus on data centres:

1. Renewable Energy Adoption: Using renewable energy sources to power sites.

2. Equipment Optimisation: Removing "zombie" equipment and migrating workloads to the cloud.

Two additional actions could significantly impact sustainability:

1. Enhanced Cooling: Datacentre owners underutilise enhanced cooling, indirectly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

2. UPS Rightsising: Adjusting uninterruptible power supply (UPS) sizes achieve moderate GHG reduction with minimal investment.

Championing refurbished IT assets offers substantial gains. These assets reduce embodied carbon and energy impact while cutting costs for decommissioning and procurement.

“Refurbished assets reduce the embodied carbon and energy impact, and halve the expense of additional labour and costs to decommission and procure new equipment,” it said.

Before these refurbished assets are obtained, the report also stated that senior leaders should consider undertaking an “analytics-driven” assessment of the devices and hardware they are replacing to ensure they are not getting rid of them prematurely.

The report continued, “Prematurely replacing devices with residual useful life wastes money and time and increases e-waste. “Analytics, rather than life span, can determine the optimal time to replace laptops, PCs, and servers.”