7a. Audit environments

There are a number of strategies that can help minimize wasted resources.

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Actions

(i) Conduct regular reviews of resource usage

Conduct regular reviews to identify idle or over-provisioned resources.

(ii) Turn off unneeded resources and right-size

Decommission or switch off additional environments, such as testing / Quality Assurance (QA) / pre-production when they are no longer in use, thereby saving resources. Right sizing should become an ongoing process, conduct regular reviews to ensure optimal resource usage.

7b. Be smart with data

Have a strategy to manage data efficiently. Reducing the volume of data that is captured, stored and accessed means reduced use of computing resources, energy and associated carbon emissions.

Actions

(i) Avoid collecting information you do not need or has been collected elsewhere, and identify opportunities for data sharing

This will help to avoid unnecessary storage of data that may not be useful or valuable, which will in turn reduce required infrastructure, power, and data transfer. Better sharing of data may mean it only needs to be collected once, saving upon storage usage.

(ii) Consider data storage

Data should only be stored when absolutely necessary, and when it is stored it should be compressed before storage, especially when it is for long term. Use the right data format, for example Parquet as opposed to CSV, which can have big savings for large data sets.

(iii) Conduct data audits

Review data regularly and ensure unneeded/duplicate data is deleted/compressed/archived. Unneeded or duplicate data takes up space on servers and consumes energy for storage.