Gartner critical of green IT effort

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Technology analyst outfit Gartner has reported that IT organisations and vendors alike are still failing to realise the importance or impact of environmental concerns on their responsibilities.

Two report' published by the analyst firm, entitled 'Green IT: The New Industry Shockwave' and '10 Key Elements of Green IT strategy,' call for more radical and wide-ranging change in attitudes and actions towards energy efficiency goals.

Simon Mingay, Gartner research vice president in the area of IT management and author of both the reports, suggested green IT strategies should extend into every area of the IT organisations remit, beyond the data centre and into vendor relationships.

Most enterprises do not yet understand the scale of the disruption that society's response to climate change will create," he wrote. "But that realisation will solidify during the next three years."

And the media hype around climate change will lead to a backlash against 'greenwashing,' which he describes as "the selective disclosure of the positive, and often superficial, environmental aspects of the enterprise or its products and services that is starting to dominate the industry".

IT organisations must, in the meantime, focus their efforts beyond the data centre and engage everyone, including architects and software developers. "Green IT is not just something for the data centre manager," said Mingay.

Of the 10 key elements Gartner identified as opportunities where IT can be used to improve the eco-efficiency or reduce the environmental footprint of the enterprise, the supply chain and its products and services come under the spotlight. "Having a high-level view on the enterprise's environmental impact helps," it said.

But at the same time, other steps were more directly practical, including creating an environmental-assessment process for all IT-related projects and investments as well as an equipment disposal process and controls.

Turning off PCs after use, discarding screen savers, avoiding over-provisioning of IT equipment, tackle waste and recycling when printing and decommissioning unused equipment are also high up Gartner's green IT agenda.

It added that shared-service models such as software as a service (SaaS) have the potential to be much more energy- and eco-efficient, as could architectural decisions, such as mainframe versus distributed platform, thin-client versus rich-client, and service-oriented architecture versus traditional architecture.

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