CIO
Summary
Andreas Bergman, head of business development at GleSYS, has a point of caution as the IT hosting and managed services industry embraces efforts to lower its carbon footprint.
“In the Nordics, running on renewable energy is the norm, which is a good thing! But at the moment there is a temptation to determine who is the most sustainable,” he says. “That in itself is not a sustainable behavior, and if taken to the extreme or out of context, can lead to greenwashing. No one benefits from an overly optimistic calculation. That’s why organizations need to look at the sustainability work of their IT services and solutions providers, make sure it is systematic, and see that it is verified through programs like VMware Zero Carbon Committed and certifications like ISO14001.”
GleSYS is no stranger to efforts to lower its carbon footprint. Serving more than 4,000 enterprises around the world with IaaS and a wide range of relevant services – including many that are VMware Cloud Verified like the GleSYS Cloud – the company operates five state-of-the-art data centers in Europe. These include two, one in Stockholm and one in Falkenberg, that are among the world’s most environmentally friendly and that route the heat they generate into the local community’s heating system.
”Basically we are a district heating provider where a part of the city’s heating needs comes from our own data centers, which of course runs on renewable energi,” adds Bergman. ”Our excess heat is sent to the central district heating system and is used to heat apartments.
It’s also important to note that it’s a viable commercial venture, so a portion of our revenue at GleSYS comes from selling our excess heat. So apart from being very cool technology, it’s also very efficient and one of the best ways to recover excess heat with a very circular process.”
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