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Most mid-sized organisations don’t set out to run on old IT. It just… happens.
A project slips into the next quarter. That server refresh gets bumped from the budget. The device strategy is to replace when someone shouts loud enough.
From the outside, everything still works. People can log in, customers are served, reports get out of the door. So IT improvements feel optional.
But they aren’t.
If you’re serious about growth and you’re talking about net zero, sustainability or being a responsible business, delaying IT improvements isn’t a neutral choice. It affects how fast you can move, how resilient you are, and how credible your environmental story looks.
As a B Corp certified MSP, we sit right in the middle of those conversations – with finance, IT, ESG leads and boards who are trying to square ambition with reality. B Corp Certification is designed to verify that a company meets high standards of social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency, and commits to using business as a force for good.
If the way you run IT doesn’t back that up, people notice.
How saying you’ll sort it next week/month/year slows growth
Let’s start with the commercial side.
When IT improvements keep getting pushed back, it usually shows up in three places: productivity, change, and risk.
1. Everyday work gets harder than it should be
You won’t always see dramatic outages but you probably will see small, nagging friction:
- Laptops that take five minutes to be usable in the morning
- Legacy systems that don’t integrate, so data is re-keyed by hand
- Remote access that’s temperamental, so people avoid doing certain work away from the office
No single issue justifies a big business case on its own, but together, they chip away at capacity. Sales teams spend less time selling, customer-facing staff spend more time apologising for slow systems, and IT teams burn hours keeping old platforms alive instead of making meaningful improvements.
On a 500+ person headcount, that’s a lot of hidden cost!
2. Change gets slower and more expensive
The longer you leave an upgrade or migration, the more tangled it becomes:
- More data on old systems
- More custom tweaks to work around limitations
- More dependencies that no one has fully documented
When you finally decide to move, projects are bigger, riskier and more expensive than they needed to be. You may need longer maintenance windows, more partner time, and more internal effort to protect the business from disruption.
What looked like saving money in the short term often turns into a larger bill later.
3. Resilience starts to rest on luck
Security is another area where delays can bite.
Older operating systems, unpatched applications, ageing firewalls, and forgotten admin accounts all increase the chance that something will go wrong.
But for your business, the immediate concern is what happens if a serious incident hits:
- Can you recover quickly?
- Do you have confidence in your backups?
- Will customers still trust you afterwards?
A breach or prolonged outage doesn’t just cost you the remediation work. It can knock revenue, delay growth plans and damage relationships you’ve spent years building.
Why IT delay is also an environmental problem
IT is often left out of sustainability conversations until someone starts asking tougher questions.
Yet digital technology has a very real footprint. Global analysis suggests that information and communication technologies emit between 0.69 and 1.6 gigatons of CO₂ equivalents a year – that’s roughly 1.5–3.2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Data centres and telecoms networks alone are responsible for a growing share of global electricity demand.
On top of that, we have a mounting e-waste issue. In 2022, the world generated a record 62 million tonnes of e-waste, and only about 22% of it was documented as formally collected and recycled. The rest was dumped, stored, or processed in ways that often harm both people and ecosystems.
So where does delaying IT improvements come in?
Old kit isn’t always the greener option
Keeping hardware for longer can be good if it’s efficient and properly maintained. But hanging on to very old servers, storage and network equipment can mean using more electricity than necessary for the same workload, especially in less efficient server rooms or data centres.
Meanwhile, modern platforms and cloud environments, especially those powered by a higher share of renewables and designed with efficiency in mind, can often deliver the same or better performance with a smaller energy footprint.
If your IT improvement plan keeps slipping, you may be locking yourself into an energy-hungry setup for longer than you think.
A reactive device strategy drives waste
On the end-user side, lack of a clear device strategy tends to create another set of problems:
- Laptops bought in a hurry and replaced in a panic
- Little visibility of how long devices are used
- No consistent approach to repair, reuse and certified recycling
When you step back and look at the whole picture – procurement, use, and end of life – it’s easy to see how an unplanned approach contributes to the 62 million tonnes of e-waste we’re already producing each year.
A more deliberate lifecycle plan can extend the life of some devices, retire others earlier for security or performance reasons, and make sure they are reused or recycled safely instead of becoming part of that statistic.
Net-zero targets are catching up with IT
In the UK, net zero by 2050 is a legal target, written into updates to the Climate Change Act. Many other countries have similar long-term commitments. For businesses, this is already showing up as:
- Client questionnaires about energy use and emissions
- Public sector tenders that require carbon reduction plans
- Investors and lenders asking more detailed ESG questions
If you have set climate or sustainability goals but you can’t explain how IT fits into them – energy, hardware, data centre choices, partners – there’s a gap between what you say and what you can evidence.
That is where environmental credibility comes in.
What environmental credibility looks like in IT
For us, environmental credibility isn’t about claiming to be perfect. It is about being able to show:
- You understand where IT has an impact
- You have made conscious choices, not just default ones
- You are improving over time and can back that up
That is also at the heart of the B Corp movement. B Corps are verified by B Lab against standards that look at governance, workers, community, environment and customers. Standards have tightened, with new minimum expectations on climate and social impact replacing the older, more flexible scoring model.
You don’t have to be a B Corp for this to affect you. The same expectations are turning up in supply chain checks, partnership decisions and hiring conversations. People want to see that IT is part of your responsible business story, not an awkward afterthought.
That might include:
- Knowing how your data centre or cloud provider sources energy
- Tracking device lifecycles and how equipment is reused or recycled
- Setting sensible policies on refresh cycles, remote work kit and home equipment
- Choosing IT partners that can talk in detail about their own impact
If your current answer to all of that is “we’ve not had time to look at it yet”, then repeated delays on IT improvements will eventually catch up with you, both with auditors and with your own team.
Moving from delay to progress
None of this means ripping everything out and starting again. In most organisations, the answer is a series of sensible, prioritised steps.
A few places we often begin with clients:
Link IT priorities to business and sustainability goals
If your growth plans rely on better customer experience, new services, or acquisitions, work out which IT improvements enable that. Do the same for your sustainability or net zero plans. That gives you a clearer case for investment than “the server is old”.
Tidy the worst friction first
Talk to teams, look at service desk data, and identify the systems or processes causing the most day-to-day pain. Often, a focused project on identity and access, device management or a key business application delivers a quick win for both productivity and security.
Start measuring what you can
You don’t need a perfect carbon model to begin. Understanding where your main IT energy use sits (on-premises rooms, data centres, specific workloads, end-user devices) is enough to start better conversations with suppliers and internal stakeholders.
Treat hardware as a lifecycle, not a one-off purchase
Set clear expectations on how long different categories of devices are kept, how they are repaired, how they are wiped, and which certified routes they go through at end of life. Use partners who can give you auditable reuse and recycling outcomes, not just a collection ticket.
Choose partners who share your view of what good business looks like
Working with a B Corp MSP means you’re not the only one thinking about people, planet and profit together. It also means you are more likely to get transparent reporting, honest trade-offs and a long-term view, rather than quick fixes that look good this quarter and cause issues next year.
Bringing it together
Delaying IT improvements can feel like a harmless way to save money and avoid disruption. In reality, it often does the opposite:
- It makes daily work harder and growth slower
- It increases the cost and risk of future change
- It leaves you with an IT footprint that is out of step with your environmental commitments
For businesses that talk about purpose, values and sustainability, that gap is becoming harder to ignore.
At IT Naturally, we believe IT should support growth and stand up to questions about impact. That’s why we chose to become a B Corp and why we spend as much time talking about governance, energy and lifecycle as we do about tickets and SLAs!
Ready to take action?
If you’d like to understand where delayed IT improvements might be holding your organisation back, commercially or environmentally, get in touch with us. We’ll help you map what you have, prioritise what matters, and build a plan that supports both growth and environmental credibility.