Aware of its corporate social responsibility, Arkas is making a contribution to the environment by applying an environmentally-sensitive approach to its information technology investments.

Arkas makes sure that environmentally-sensitive approaches are an integral part of its business processes and it evaluates every technological product and software accordingly before it makes a selection. Green IT is becoming even more important these days in view of the fact that the information and communication technology sector as a whole causes two percent of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the world and that the resulting cloud of CO2 gas is as large as the continent of Africa.

Arkas has reduced carbon emissions by 38 tons over the past two years
When the number of personnel and amount of IT infrastructure is compared with similar companies, it is evident that Arkas uses much fewer PCs and has an infrastructure that operates with a low amount of processing power. The IT infrastructure is based on the low energy Microsoft Terminal Server, which indirectly reduces the amount of CO2 that would be emitted to produce the energy required by the same number of PCs.

Now that the use of Microsoft Office Communicator has been expanded since January, all Arkas employees around the world can do their work by transferring voice and video over existing Arkas WAN lines. This not only reduces both travel and telephone expenses, it also helps to reduce CO2 emissions that would be created by aircraft. Thanks to its environmental policy and the products it has chosen, Arkas has reduced carbon emissions by 38 tons over the past two years.

Furthermore, thanks to a corporate intranet managed with Microsoft SharePoint Server, many corporate documents can be processed in an electronic environment. This not only speeds up procedures by a factor of four, it also saves on office supplies and labor.

Arkas plans to carry out all official correspondence electronically, making a further contribution to protecting the environment by eliminating paper consumption and unnecessary printer output.