In a study conducted by the Columbia University Environmental Stewardship, engaging power management settings on a desktop with a LCD monitor that is normally on 24/7 will reduce the device’s carbon footprint and energy costs by 79 percent. On average, only 36 percent of computers are turned off each night, according to a Lawrence Berkeley National Lab Report.
The ability to enforce power management policies can save, on average, $5 per month per machine. Multiplying that number by hundreds or thousands of devices translates into savings of tens of thousands of dollars per year for our clients, in addition to reducing your carbon footprint.
Impulse Point is the first NAC provider to incorporate a power management policy technology within its standard feature set. This, coupled with the energy reductions garnered as a result of SafeConnect’s scalability advantages, makes SafeConnect a natural choice for organizations going green.
The energy used by servers not only contributes to a rise in electricity costs but also to a rise in carbon emissions, greenhouse gases, and global warming. Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) are gases present in the atmosphere that reduce the loss of heat into space and contribute to a general rise in global temperatures. The public generally thinks of emissions as coming from vehicles, airplanes, or even farm animals (in the case of methane). But IT equipment accounted for about 2% of the world’s carbon emissions last year.
Legacy NAC systems involve a complicated deployment of multiple servers or appliances to manage the security policy compliance of end users. For example, to support an environment of 10,000 users these Legacy NAC systems usually employ 12 to 16 servers to address scalability and redundancy requirements.
From an energy consumption standpoint, these systems are very expensive – using more than 10,000 kWh a month. At an average cost of 8.98 cents a kWh, a 14 appliance investment can quickly add up to nearly $11,000 a year in electricity costs. Additionally, the energy used to power these same 14 (or more) servers emits at least 37 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – the equivalent of burning 4,079 gallons of gasoline or 97 barrels of oil.
To put these figures in perspective, the average car in the United States drives 12,000 miles a year and gets 19.8 miles to a gallon of gas. This average car produces 5.4 metric tons of carbon emissions a year. Energy required to power a typical Legacy NAC system generates almost 7 times the emissions given off by a single car per year.
SafeConnect was specifically designed to scale non-intrusively and cost-effectively to support large networks. The architecture design does not require the use of bandwidth intensive network scanning, which limits scalability in other NAC alternatives and prevents them from delivering continuous (post-admission) security posture validation. Its vendor-independent, out-of-line approach easily integrates into existing network architecture with no manipulation of switches, no forklift upgrades, and fewer moving parts—which also contributes to its scalability advantage.
Impulse Point’s SafeConnect Network Access Control solution requires a much lower expenditure in energy and produces fewer carbon emissions because the solution is scalable.
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