1. Switch things off when you're not using them
Modems, printers, and monitors… they all still use a lot of energy when left on overnight, even in standby mode. Even 3-D Screen savers, which use 100% of CPU power to run, don’t just waste energy, they slow down any programs you run when away from your machine. Don't forget, CPUs still run screen savers even when a monitor is switched off!

Circle IT’s comprehensive Server/Desktop Management suite provides tools such as scheduling software to automatically change power management settings on laptops and to switch processes involving peripherals on or off as required.

2. Don't travel to the office unless you really need to
Recent surveys have shown that having home workers delivers a range of business benefits that would help organisations to avoid the effects of the credit crunch. Circle IT has set-up highly effective home working solutions for Convey UK Solicitors, Harding Evans Solicitors and DWF – enabling each of these firms to save costs and improve productivity for their staff.

If you or your staff’s physical presence isn’t required in the office, then take advantage of home-working as a viable alternative; your working day doesn’t need to be comprised just because you’re operating from home - email, information and application access can still be seamless. In addition, technology such as ‘NetMeeting’ enables home workers to still ‘be there’ with web conferencing and white boarding software.

3. Reduce & Reuse
Invest in a reliable back-up medium and get in the habit of relying on it. Confidence in your back-up means less wasted paper printing out documents in triplicate for filing and if you do have to print something out, see if it can be double sided. If it's a draft, encourage staff to print on the back of used sheets such as the self-test pages some printers spit out every time you switch them on.

Circle IT's Online Backup solution ensures all of our customer’s data is securely and automatically backed up nightly to our Cardiff data centre and then copied across the city to a second data centre for failover. Not only does this means you won’t have all the hassle of remembering to manually backup with tapes, if a re-install is ever required it can be done easily and quickly giving you complete peace of mind that your data is fully recoverable.

4. Shop around for a better deal
Whether it's your energy bills, broadband, mobile phone or insurance, the chances are you could save money by changing tariff or provider. Your IT infrastructure is no different – ask yourself, is the cost of internally supporting your IT infrastructure and its users doing your budget justice?

Circle IT offers Entry level, Complementary and Outsourced support to suit the needs of our clients. It really is a viable alternative - by switching to an outsourced model, Circle IT helped Celtic Energy to reduce its IT support costs by 70%.

5. Reduce your technology footprint
As a business grows, through expansion or merger for example, it’s inevitable that the physical volume of technology hardware required to support that organisation will also grow. A burgeoning IT room not only consumes a lot of power, it also takes up valuable and costly office space which could potentially be reutilized. At some point, a certain amount of hardware consolidation and rationalisation is usually necessary to make the best use of resources.

Virtualisation is a highly effective approach to reducing the amount of resources such as printers and servers required to provide IT services for an organisation. Circle IT recently enabled Convey UK Solicitors to reduce nine of its physical servers down to three virtual servers, immediately saving them money and reducing their power requirement and physical IT footprint.