Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Reality Bytes #22 – Data Hungry Humans: the future of Green IT

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Reality Bytes #22 – Data Hungry Humans: the future of Green IT · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

0:01
Welcome it, change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim Flower and Tom McGraw.
0:07
Let's get into it. Hello, everybody, welcome to a very special,
0:12
very bittersweet Reality Bites today. It's special because we actually have for the
0:18
first time, I believe, if I'm not very much mistaken, we actually
0:21
have a full house. Absolutely everybody is here. So that's Tim Catherine,
0:27
our producer, Dina, Megan, Sean Oriana, and our very special guest,
0:32
Sam Holsman. Now he's a very special guest because this is Sam's last
0:36
ever Reality Bites. He's He's got a fantastic new new opportunity starting next week.
0:42
So Sam is leaving next think where he's been doing many fantastic things,
0:47
including editing our wonderful dex Hub and being a fantastic panelist, guest and real
0:54
force behind the scenes for this show. So we're really going to miss him
0:57
and glad everybody could come to this his leaving due Sam. How's how's your
1:00
last week going? How are you feeling about the last recording? Yeah,
1:03
Tom, it's absolutely bittersweet. This is UH. This has probably been one
1:07
of the most fun parts of UH this job, appearing on this podcast,
1:12
my first ever podcast that I think I've ever appeared on was Here with Here
1:18
with You, on The Duck Show and Reality Bites. So it's been a
1:22
lot of fun doing this and I'll definitely miss it. You've got you got
1:25
podcasting chop Sam. Nobody could say otherwise, you're gonna you're gonna bring the
1:29
podcasting skills into you a new role. Do you think you're gonna You're gonna,
1:32
You're gonna you gotta launch a podcast. You're gonna become competition. So
1:36
that's what I'm looking for the first now, So we'll see. I mean,
1:38
I mean, I feel like I gotta keep keep those muscles working or
1:42
else, or else I'll lose them. So I don't know, we'll see.
1:45
Maybe maybe the skills will carry over. I think you know that.
1:49
Well, you know, just just don't go into direct competition. That's what
1:51
we're saying. No, no, no, whole new, whole new avenue.
1:53
I'll I'll Reality bites, will We'll still stand remain sacristy, Well sue
2:00
you studio for intellectual property. Okay, well no, we've We're going to
2:05
really miss having you as a colleague. And you know, as as I
2:07
say, you've you've you've You've not just been a great panelist, but you've
2:10
been somebody who's helped us to form so many of the shows we've done,
2:14
come up with so many ideas, so many structures, and as such,
2:17
it feels only right that you've come up with an idea for your final horal,
2:22
which is which is a kind of green It retrospective, right, And
2:27
I think I think what we're seeing and I think there's a few good reasons
2:29
to be discussing green It again here today. You know, I think it's
2:34
kind of bubbling back up into the zeitgeist for my reading in a way that
2:38
it hasn't since two three years ago, when it was really felt like it
2:42
was over rage and it was a really kind of dominant discussion point. Then
2:46
I feel it's been relatively low key. Obviously, a lot has happened to
2:49
the economy and in the industry since then, which has kind of recalibrated people's
2:53
perspective. But I think it's fair to say, I mean, just Sam,
2:57
maybe you go first. Is it is it fair to say that we've
2:59
seen its recurrence recently, and we've seen it kind of even though it felt
3:04
like a very kind of pandemic vocal point. Almost it was very aligned with
3:09
kind of the kind of things that people were were specifically most interested in during
3:14
the pandemic. It's now research in its own right, and it's kind of
3:16
almost cohabiting with a lot of the concern of focus around efficiency and economizing,
3:23
etc. I mean, what do you think, So, yeah, absolutely,
3:25
And I think that applies to a lot of the kind of big trends
3:30
in it that either popped up during the early stages of the pandemic or were
3:35
even kind of faded away in the pandemic to make way for a kind of
3:39
the necessity of how the workplace has changed. I think we've kind of entered
3:44
this period now a few years on from the pandemic, where workplaces have you
3:50
know, stabilized to the point that they are kind of determining, um,
3:55
you know, what their you know future looks like in terms of, you
4:00
know, what they're going to value, what their priorities are. You know.
4:03
In twenty twenty obviously, and even twenty twenty one, for the most
4:08
part, and even you know a little bit into twenty twenty two, companies
4:12
were still in a very rocky place of you know, um scrambling to go
4:17
remote at first and then kind of determine what their return to the office looks
4:23
like, what a hybrid workplace might look like. And so during those times,
4:28
a lot of these companies may have, uh, you know, valued
4:30
sustainability and wanted to implement more kind of green it practices, but just didn't
4:36
have the resources to do so, especially in a time where there was so
4:43
much upheaval going on. And so I think we've kind of entered a place
4:46
where, because things have leveled out a bit, I think green it is
4:50
rising to the forefront, as companies are saying, all right, now we
4:54
we kind of we know what our workplace looks like, and it's you know,
4:57
it's it's relatively stable compared to a few years ago. So let's really
5:00
kind of make this a priority again. So I think we're seeing that a
5:04
lot. M SAM, You're going to set the table so so impeccably,
5:10
just to make us know what we're going to be next week. All right,
5:13
Okay, So I think it's all laid out very well, and before
5:15
we sort of dive into it and get everybody's kind of take some perspectives here,
5:19
I just want to go to Oriana quickly because Arianna pointed out that in
5:23
the group chat that you know Next Thing is effectively relaunching it's it's green I
5:29
solution in a couple of weeks time. Um, Orianna, why do you
5:32
think this is this is such a good time for Next Thing to be doing
5:36
this and what's what's in your view of the legacy of that first effort and
5:41
what are the learnings and iterations that make this a kind of a significant announcement.
5:47
Yeah, I'm really excited about this initiative, and I will say it
5:51
is definitely driven by our customers. We are responding to the direct request to
5:58
have this kind of car right, so it's out there. This is something
6:01
people care about, they want to do, and they want to have a
6:05
tool set to do it more effectively and efficiently. I think the other component
6:11
and why I'm really excited to be working on this initiative is that in the
6:16
past it was really driven by a passion for greening the world right, for
6:21
being sustainable. This is one of our values here at Next Thing that I
6:27
think is really great. We are really passionate about being a green company ourselves.
6:32
The thing that we're incorporating now that I'm working on personally is incorporating the
6:38
science of behavioral change. Right, So this is the thing that I'm always
6:42
talking about, is how do we make change easier? How do we give
6:45
people the tools to do this in a way that makes sense for a human
6:48
consumer, not just from a machine perspective. So that's going to be incorporated
6:55
into how we're approaching this. Next is trying to make that really easy for
6:59
people so they don't have to figure it out individually. All these different organizations
7:03
they're using this tour say excellent, excellent. And I suppose that maybe just
7:08
to sort of complete that picture around around the product offering, Dina, I
7:14
wonder if you could add the context to what Oriona was talking about around around
7:18
visibility and why the kind of capacity Next Thing lends for kind of unique level
7:26
of visibility fits so well and so important in actually facilitating and making possible a
7:32
really green IT solution. Adding up to that, most of the customers without
7:41
Next Thing, So think of it this way. Without Next Thing, you
7:44
don't have the visibility on the endpoint, health, the environment, overall,
7:48
what is contributing to the consumption on the endpoint, et cetera. But with
7:53
the Next Thing, you have with the green it the old one or with
7:57
the new one as well, you'll have the full visibility of the environment,
8:00
so you'll be able to advise your users in environment A B and see in
8:05
the way that fits them. More so, you'll be able to spot what
8:09
is the issue that needs to be conserved a little bit or reconsumed or reassessed,
8:16
whether it's going to be in the extending the life expectancy of a hardware
8:20
or using little um charging less or expanding the battery life, etc. Etc.
8:28
So, depending on every environment, visibility is key here. And with
8:31
the fact that you'll be able to see, diagnose, and fix, if
8:35
we're following the same mindset, then we'll be able to optimize the usage of
8:39
the endpoints, pay customer payer, environment pay rules and regulations of the country
8:43
as well. Right. So let's let's that's that sets for scene really really
8:50
well. Right, So we have a kind of context in which it's taken
8:52
place. We hear what's available by just interested tim to come to you and
8:56
just to find out whether your connections, your conversations with nexting customers point to
9:05
a willingness in the organizations themselves to really embrace this kind of technology of the
9:09
moment, what's your what's your impression? It's interesting time I talked to customers
9:16
in terms of green it in two regards. The first is what they want
9:22
to do and need to do, and the second is what they need to
9:26
be able to calculate to justify the purchase of software. So over the years,
9:33
green it has been this nebulous, especially during the pandemic. You know,
9:37
end user compute was perceived as all happening at home. It's not my
9:43
company's energy, So why do I need to worry about measuring the impact of
9:46
green it for employees that are that are essentially on their own power grid.
9:52
Um. But as I traveled and talked with customers, most recently during our
9:56
sales kickoff around the world, it was interesting to get some input from customers
10:03
in Europe and even our field sales team to talk to even more customers than
10:07
I do. Obviously in the Middle East, I asked the question pretty regularly
10:11
how important is green it to our customers? And the feedback I got in
10:16
the Middle East was it's a must have. We have to have it in
10:20
any product that we bring in and any justification that we bring in. How
10:26
is this going to impact our carbon footprint, for instance, and how and
10:31
or how will this help us measure our carbon footprint. So while I think
10:35
the pandemic we may have seen a bit of a lull in the importance of
10:37
green it, I do to your earlier point, I do think it's coming
10:41
back around. The feedback I get is more and more enterprises are concerned about
10:50
their impact on the environment and their ability to measure that impact. To Dina's
10:54
point that visibility isn't just being able to see blue screens, being able to
11:00
see slow log ons, it's being able to calculate the actual consumption of technology
11:07
and then convert that over into the impact on green I measurement. So definitely
11:13
getting more feedback that it is getting more important, fascinating, and I suppose
11:16
that's the if that's the kind of corporate perspective, be interesting to speak to
11:22
you, Megan about your experiences as a conscientious employee organizations, not just as
11:28
an employee. In fact, I'm actually interested in a phrase that denised in
11:33
the group chat today, which was data hungry humans. Absolutely, and it
11:37
is a forerunner of the episode title or I feel, but as an employee
11:45
or even as a consumer of data Megan has the last couple of years seeing
11:50
you iterate on your own personal it practices in either in either area and to
11:56
what extent. Yeah, that's an interesting question. So before I worked at
12:01
Next Day, self worked here for like a year and a half. At
12:03
this point, before I worked here, I had never really considered the environmental
12:09
impact of my data consumption and my digital habits. And I say that as
12:13
someone who I consider myself to be a very environmentally conscious person, Like,
12:18
you know, I'm the sort of person who composts and turns all my lights
12:22
off and doesn't drive my car very much, and you know, we'll only
12:26
buy secondhand clothes and tries to read up on everything happening in the environmental movement,
12:31
and like, you know, as far left as I could be in
12:33
terms of the environment. But I just had never educated myself on digital habits.
12:37
I guess I just never encountered that information. And then when I joined
12:41
Next Thing, that was I think towards the in the middle of our sort
12:43
of first push around green I t a couple of years ago, and that
12:48
immediately it just struck me as like, oh, I've never considered on my
12:52
phone and on my Google photos or whatever, Like I have photos that go
12:56
all the way back to when I first got a smartphone, Like I'd never
13:01
considered that that data obviously is stored somewhere, yeah data center. Yeah,
13:07
that's like using energy. And yeah, I really pushed myself and even like
13:11
the impact of like shutting your computer down versus just like closing your laptop at
13:15
the end of the day. Like for me, it was I closed my
13:16
laptop. It's not it's not using energy now like whatever, It's fine,
13:20
but it is like the battery's slowly draining. So I yeah, it really
13:24
made me rethink my habits and then thinking about like next think having a product
13:30
like this and companies thinking about their environmental impact. It's if I'm thinking about
13:35
my impact, which I'm just one individual, how many photos can I really
13:37
have on my phone? So but and you think about that at the at
13:41
the corporate scale, and it's it's a huge, huge environmental impact. So
13:46
I think having products like what next thing is offering is it's really cool for
13:50
me as an environmental employee to think that a company would be taking that step
13:56
and looking into that and actually like seeking that data to understand the environmental impact
14:01
of all of their employees collectively and of all their endpoints, and trying to
14:05
mitigate that through behavior change or policy or whatever it is. So yeah,
14:09
it's been an interesting journey of education for me, and it's something that now
14:13
I like to tell everybody about. I thought about the exact same thing again,
14:16
just the story about photos. Being the elder on the call, I
14:20
can't imagine that any of you actually had a photo album or even know what
14:24
a photo album is if it's not digital. I did too. You used
14:31
to take a picture, you'd get it developed, you'd put it in a
14:33
photo album, you'd put it on the bookshelf. Now I haven't. I
14:35
was just doing this math last night. I have photos on my phone that
14:39
sink to the eye to the cloud. I also have them synked through the
14:43
cable to my laptop, which sinks to one drive, and then I also
14:46
back them up to a NAS drive that I have in my apartment. So
14:50
I have photos in five places and there I'm sure that any single place is
14:54
not identical to the others. And you know, if I lose photos,
14:58
then they're gone for good. So I want to make sure they're backed up.
15:01
But having them in five places is just nuts. That's fine. I
15:07
guess you've just you know, recently became a granddad. So I guess the
15:13
amount of photos you're never receiving not only Yeah, of course, I don't
15:22
think I'll tell you funny. I don't think I've taken a selfie in my
15:26
life until I had my oldest time the day he was born, I became
15:30
a selfie machine. Can stop it with the child with me? Of course,
15:33
you know? But so so right, I understand Sean has brought some
15:41
some questions to put to the whole group, a kind of quick fire green
15:46
it around a question, is that right? Showing it to lead us out?
15:50
Yeah, I suppose so. I think we've been talking about there's a
15:54
huge, bigger topic with climate change and then a more practical issue that we're
15:58
facing just within their corporate sector, and how our company deals with endpoints and
16:03
helps it departments. I guess what are some of the ways this is a
16:07
question to the experts that we can help different companies deal with their endpoints and
16:12
not only you know, reverse climate change in a way, but also save
16:18
money at the same time. Just you know, I can even just list
16:22
a couple or off the top of your heads, just so we kind of
16:26
have a better idea education first, so we need to educate our users,
16:32
colleagues, family members, etc. But the fact that, yeah, those
16:37
mini pictures, the hundreds of reels, videos, and all of the streaming
16:44
content that we have now online, I think it takes us like billions of
16:48
years until the until we can barely just we watch everyone once at least,
16:52
So by educating everybody about the fact that this is s toward somewhere two,
16:57
three or four times and it's multiplying the amount of energy that it is needed,
17:03
whether it's electricity, water for coolers, etc. Or even that you're
17:08
trying to watch a video that is uploaded in four continents away from you,
17:14
so it takes a lot of hops until it gets to you. So it
17:17
passes by three four data centers until it gets to you. So all of
17:21
that would be consuming a lot. So really just keep and do what is
17:25
necessary. It's cool because back in the days we didn't have that, So
17:29
we're starting off from cable TVs and then now we have phones and content with
17:33
you everywhere you are basically, So the fact that now we start to with
17:37
education, I think this is the key to changing the human behavior so we
17:42
can be less data hungry humans, right, Yeah, I put them into
17:45
a couple of different buckets. We've been talking a lot about storage items,
17:52
the photos, the emails. I have emails going back way too long.
17:56
Technically, you know, you should be able to go in and delete everything
17:59
that I would say over a year old. If the emails over a year
18:03
old and you need to find it, they're going to have to send it
18:06
again. And that those widgets that we hang on to take storage in a
18:11
data center with a hard drive and array spinning and consuming consuming power and then
18:19
it ages and it needs to be refreshed. So I put it kind of
18:22
into storage and data center. Another piece is power consumption. I think,
18:29
Megan, you mentioned, you know, letting your laptop drain down and then
18:32
having to recharge it. I don't know how you can really avoid needing to
18:34
recharge the laptop. But power consumption is another. And then I think a
18:40
big one that is often overlooked is we look at hardware refresh and efficient hardware
18:45
refresh to hang onto devices that are still useful and still have useful life as
18:52
a money saving effort just to extend the life of the asset. You don't
18:55
need to buy a new one. But the other side of that equation is
18:56
you're also removing it or or delaying its entry into a landfill somewhere. So
19:06
proper and full use, full exercising use of an asset to prevent it going
19:11
into a landfill before its time, I think is an important one too.
19:15
I don't have any other questions, but it does kind of gel nicely with
19:18
past research we've done with our own anonymous data where we looked at I think
19:22
it was close to three and a half million anonymous devices from our customers and
19:29
found that a lot of things influence the startup time, which thus impacted the
19:33
emissions. So we were able to find out that just through a few configuration
19:38
changes, we were able to decrease these long startup times and not only make
19:44
people more productive, but cut down on emissions as well and save some money.
19:48
So that makes a lot of sense with what you guys have been saying.
19:52
So I think education is also a really important component because technology changes so
19:59
fast, actually draining your battery for a lithium ion battery, which is what
20:03
we have in our computers, is not the best practice that will actually wear
20:06
them out. So that practice was really good with an older generation of batteries,
20:11
that's no longer true. So some of these habits that maybe we learned
20:15
twenty years ago for being environmentally friendly actually don't apply to the technology that we
20:21
have today. And then there's also the question of what is feasible and sustainable
20:26
to do. Like I don't think that we should all just stop watching YouTube
20:29
videos, because honestly, that's probably not going to be super effective. But
20:33
on the technology side, there are so many things we can do to make
20:37
technology better and more efficient, like better batteries, like trying to extend hardware.
20:41
Hardware is often one of our biggest footprints, so I know that's one
20:45
of the places where I think it's super valuable to try and extend the life
20:48
of our hardware. And that's one of the things that also is a great
20:52
cost saving measure, right Like all of my technology, I try and purchase
20:57
it refurbished because I get it out of huge discount that way, and also
21:03
I know that I have minimized my personal footprint. But there's also this whole
21:07
movement of green coding that I think is really exciting that considers components like infrastructure
21:15
processing and even DevOps and how to make the technology that we use more efficient.
21:21
Right, so by making processing more efficient, we can even improve any
21:25
easier experiences by, for example, making sure that data isn't routed unnecessarily through
21:30
extremious data centers, by reducing overprovisioning both material and in the cloud. I
21:37
know if you talk to any DevOps person, they will happily tell you how
21:41
frustrating it is how easy it can be to spin up new instances that then
21:45
get abandoned, and that can cost a company a lot of money as well
21:51
as consuming a tremendous amount of resources. So I think there's a lot of
21:55
gray systemic changes that can be made as well as those sort of individual ones,
22:00
and that's one of the things that keeps it more manageable to listen.
22:03
Thank you so much everybody. I think that was a very worth while revisit
22:07
to the Green Eye t topic. And thank you Sam for thinking of it,
22:12
and thank you Sam for everything you've done on the show. I think
22:15
we should do all say goodbye goodbye Sam, Bye, goodbye Sam. Thanks
22:25
everybody. To make sure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the
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22:48
Until next time.