What does Green IT really mean for the enterprise?
The ICT industry is a major energy consumer of energy. So globally there have been studies that have put ICT energy consumption and then by extension carbon, CO2 emissions, at about 2% or 2.5% of the global total. So it is a significant industry in terms of energy consumption and a significant industry in terms of CO2 emissions.
And so I think for companies that look at this whether they are motivated by truing to go green or they’re motivated simply by cost concerns there’s no question that this is someplace we can look and really try to drive cost savings in terms of power consumption, energy savings, and then also reducing the carbon footprint for a company. So it is significant area to look at and that’s what we’re going to do for the next half an hour or so.
The other part that I want to set this up at the onset. We could go in a lot of directions talking about a green IT. Obviously the IT industry itself and we as consumers of information technology, products and services want to look at how we can reduce the emissions in those activities. But of course at the same time the IT industry provides all sorts of solutions that can make us more efficient and more productive and may reduce our emissions in other things we do.
We can pick up the phone instead of driving over to see someone. We can use telepresence instead of flying to see someone. All of things also we can use IT as a tool, as well as just looking within the datacentre or within the desktop computing environment, at what we can do to reduce energy consumption and reduce CO2 emissions.
By
Ted Dean, President & Managing Director, BDA Research
(Courtesy: NetEvents)