Survey Says: Green IT Gathering Momentum
Survey Says: Green IT Gathering Momentum
July 17, 2007: According the Sun Microsystems, two thirds of businesses have environmental or green practices in place, yet there is a significant difference between the green business practices of businesses and what’s actually going on in the IT department.
The results come off the back of an Australia New Zealand wide survey by the vendor of 1500 customers from 758 organisations. The idea of the study was to determine the eco progress of attitudes and initiatives for greening up IT.
While 60 percent of companies surveyed claim to have environmental business practices in place, just 27 percent have eco-friendly plans in place for the IT department. Although another 21 percent plan to launch green initiatives in the next 12 months, given the energy consumption rate of the IT department, the survey highlights a significant gap between business policy and IT operations.
However in proving green is the new black; two thirds of respondents claim to evaluate a vendor’s green policy before investing in their solutions.
According to Jim Hassell, managing director for Sun Microsystems ANZ, it’s no surprise that green technology initiatives are lagging behind eco business plans. “For a large organisation, greening the IT department and data centre can take up to 18 months,” he says. “The fact that 48 percent of customers surveyed already have or will deploy eco technology within the next 12 months is extremely positive.”
Although Hassell is impressed by the amount of organisations planning to go green, he also highlights the point that in large companies, 20 percent of total energy costs can be attributed to the IT department. “Sceptics will argue that it’s futile or indeed impossible to green power hungry facilities such as data centres,” he says. “In our experience, a medium sized company can save hundreds of thousands in energy costs through eco technology.”
On greening the IT department, while 27 percent have dedicated IT plans in place and 51 percent are currently exploring their options, the final 22 percent are reported to have no plans at all. The bigger the organisation the more green thinking they’re likely to be, with 76 percent of larger organisations (5000 employees or more) having green business practices in place compared to 39 percent of organisations with less than 100 employees.
Respondents identified the top four strategies for ‘greening’ up the IT department as energy efficient technologies (80 percent,) power and cooling solutions (63 percent,) systems virtualisation (60 percent) and data centre consolidation (48 percent.)
“It is almost impossible to avoid the environmental debate today,” says Hassell. “We’re serious about eco responsibility – from the design of our products to ease recycling, to the reduction of our corporate greenhouse gas emissions.
“We encourage our employees to work from home, share offices and work at satellite locations,” continues Hassell. “So much so that globally 55 percent of our employees have given up their offices reducing our carbon emissions by 30,000 tons.”