How green IT can ease recession blues

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Environmental issues are now at the forefront of worldwide affairs, more than they ever have been before.

Tackling global warming is now considered a responsibility that lies not just with governments, but with the general public and businesses as well.

For the latter, one of the few positives to emerge from the recession was that environmentally-friendly operations could be beneficial for overall efficiencies. Firms started to recognise that being green could help ease recessionary blues.

Spotting signs of synergy

Even during the recession, when economic anxieties were more pressing than any other worldwide concern, green technology remained a surprisingly pertinent area for businesses.

A Gartner survey carried out in the midst of the downturn showed that being green was not placed low down the pecking order of priorities. At the time of the poll in December 2008, almost half (46 per cent) of European respondents anticipated spending more than 15 per cent of their IT capital budgets on green projects.

What this research hinted at was a synergy between green technology and efficient business operations.

Darren Strange, head of environmental sustainability in the UK at Microsoft, explained to IT PRO that in the past, companies implementing green initiatives typically did so as part of their sense of corporate social responsibility and because of their own conviction.

"And then… we realised we could save money as well by most of the practices that reduce your carbon, reduce your energy costs," Strange said.

Richard Roberts, UK and Ireland director for sustainability and the environment at Cisco, agreed about the impact of the recession on green technology: "If you look at the way that sustainability and efficiency have come together in the last six months, it is fairly dramatic."

"The view was that you could have cost reduction and a carbon agenda and the two could be fairly separate. However, I think what the recession has done is thrown the two together and people have seen the value in having a very, very proactive attitude towards the consumption of energy and what impact that can have in terms of operational efficiency, just from a pure consumption point of view."

Less energy, more benefits

Cutting energy use has the obvious rewards of lower outgoings and reduced emissions, regardless of the fact that businesses will most likely care more about the former.

IT can have a significant role to play in achieving these benefits in a variety of ways. One key area that firms are looking to leverage is using IT to measure energy use in the data centre, according to Nathaniel Martinez, a program director in IDC's European System Infrastructure Solutions Group.

"This is a trend that we are seeing throughout organisations and data centres in the UK," Martinez told IT PRO. He said this is mainly down to the fact that businesses now need to have better control over what is being spent and at what level.

Cutting hardware use has also emerged as a key cost-reduction strategy among organisations and here virtualisation has been a popular choice, Martinez noted.

On the one level, firms have turned to virtualisation as a way of extending the lifecycle of hardware they already run. In addition, the technology has given firms greater control of their data as well as being positive for the environment, he added.

A report from IDC this April showed that 17.7 per cent of all new servers shipped in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in the fourth quarter of last year were virtualised. This represented an increase of 16.31 per cent from the same period in 2008.

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