Tips To 'Green' Your SME

Repositioning your business as a more environmentally-friendly one can significantly save costs in the long-run.

- Aaron Thornton

Load shedding, water shortages, and overcoming a high-carbon footprint are just some of the environmental matters making the headlines in recent years. And that is not even factoring in the impact 16-year-old teen climate activist Greta Thunberg has had on popular sentiment. But apart from it being the right thing to do, ‘going green’ in your SME can significantly save costs in the long run - with many of the measures not even being that difficult to implement.

Here are some of the steps you can take towards repositioning your business as a more environmentally-friendly one.

1 Cloud first

In the ultra-connected landscape of business today, going the cloud route seems almost a given. In fact, transitioning key services to an online environment is probably one of the fastest ways an SME can cut costs and become more environmentally sustainable.

With South Africa firmly on the radar of multinationals opening their data centres in the country, now is the best time to make the move. Without going into the complexities of the various cloud models available, each have their strengths. But all of them come down to being able to host data and applications remotely.

This significantly reduces the need to buy new hardware and software for the business. Cloud-based solutions scale according to the needs of your SME and all software is automatically updated. Plus, your business will use less electricity as these powerful systems are off-site.