Symantec joins Computers Off Australia advisory board

COA is a not-for-profit educational marketing and awareness campaign, combined with a labelling scheme designed to reduce Australia’s IT carbon footprint.

It classifies organisations using three colour-coded ticks that represent Power Management (Green), Virtualisation (Blue) and Carbon Neutral (Gold).

The environmental certification labelling scheme aims to help businesses, government and individuals identify organisations that are doing their bit in reducing their CO2 emissions by lowering their power consumption.

According to Scroggie, he is looking forward to helping promote ICT sustainability practices that will reduce Australia’s IT carbon footprint.

“Symantec has developed practices and software that apply techniques such as clustering, storage and server virtualisation, storage tiering, data deduplication, and the effective utilisation of power management on PCs to conserve energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve utilisation of IT assets and save money on IT expenditures,” he said.

“Symantec is also dedicated to minimising its own environmental footprint and recently committed to reducing its CO2 emissions by 15 percent by fiscal year 2012.

“Symantec’s environmental focus is intertwined with the company's core purpose of securing and managing our customers’ information-driven world,” he added.

Dr Idris F. Sulaiman, CEO of COA, said Scroggie will assist COA’s efforts in raising awareness of best practices in ICT energy efficiency among end users and will help promote the adoption of key energy-efficiency measures such as network power management as well as server and desktop virtualisation.

Computers Off Australia is also lobbying a number of government agencies and organisations to develop their green IT strategies in line with the recommendations of the recent Gershon Report.

These outline that government agencies develop a whole-of-government ICT sustainability plan to manage the carbon footprint of their ICT activities and identify a list of quick wins in this area, such as software controlled automatic turn-off of PCs.

COA claims government agencies that adopt this software will receive COA certification, providing third party validation that they are implementing energy efficiency measures.