Digital Clean Up – Delete to save the planet!

In the digital world, similar to the environment, there is a huge amount of trash. Unnecessary emails, files, apps, duplicates of photos and videos are all digital waste. This digital trash creates digital pollution that continues to consume energy even when we have forgotten it. It sits in the backups on servers that provide us with cloud services and continue consuming electricity. The Brunel Foundation wants to bring attention to this growing digital energy consumption issue. Both businesses and individuals have a huge opportunity to make an impact in reducing digital waste.

“At Brunel, we process and store large amounts of data. It is important that we manage and process this data in a professional and responsible way. Our department is continuously looking for the best solutions to protect our data, but also to reduce our carbon footprint. We do this by examining the size of the network drives and performing clean-up actions on the databases behind the applications used. Without neglecting obligations regarding retentions in connection with, for example, AVG/GDPR but also by initiating large projects.

In 2018, we migrated all our data from our regional datacenters and partner datacenters to the Microsoft Azure Cloud. We thoroughly examined all the data in the data centers and made a design to rebuild the application servers and only migrated the necessary data. We were able to remove all duplicates and backups with no business impact. Also, all local copies and backups on external devices (such as backup tapes) could be cleaned out. This resulted in a data storage reduction of 25%.

Another milestone was creating Brunel’s Modern Workplace. This was the start of a project to enable, among other things, modern collaboration tools such as Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint. With these tools, anyone within Brunel can use and share files in a modern way, such as sharing links instead of copies, collaborating on a project via Teams and using SharePoint instead of the legacy fileserver shares. The first data migration project around these tools is the personal network drive migration, where we move files to a user personal OneDrive, which resides in the Microsoft Cloud.