XL Capital Cuts Costs While Reducing Its Carbon Footprint

As companies across all industries look to tighten their budgets to cope with the current economy, environmentally friendly IT initiatives can contribute significantly to company cost savings, especially in helping curb energy usage and travel expenses and improve operational efficiencies.

For instance, part of XL Capital's efforts to reduce its carbon footprint includes the consolidation of our IT infrastructure. XL is reducing the number of physical data center locations, virtualizing computing resources and asking employees to utilize shared infrastructure rather than dedicated resources. XL has also outsourced IT services to third parties that are utilizing virtual and shared infrastructure across multiple customer companies. With these initiatives, XL is increasing the utilization and efficiency of the IT infrastructure and increasing economies of scale beyond its own footprint to reduce IT expenses and energy consumption. Virtualization also enables organizations to be more flexible in responding to demand for IT services.

As a global insurance and reinsurance provider, XL also relies on technology to support collaboration and accessibility for our employees and customers around the world. By deploying collaboration technologies with remote accessibility to the IT infrastructure, we are enabling employees to effectively work from anywhere, reducing the need to collaborate in person and, thus, reducing travel requirements. In some instances, this offers us the opportunity to put our employees -- such as our global team of risk engineers, which helps clients minimize their risk exposure -- closer to the clients they serve. These technologies are enabling a virtualized workforce of both employees and service providers that lowers expenses and contributes to XL's customer service commitment, all while helping reduce XL's carbon footprint.