15-May-2014
Green IT: Does it still matter?
By Adrian Thirkill, managing director, Easynet Global Services UK
Five years ago, you couldn’t move for ‘green’ claims from businesses.
In a rush to become the first businesses to go carbon neutral, hoards
of companies offset air miles, replanted forests, and invested in wind
farms. “We turn our lights off at night!” they whooped. “We put monitors
on automatic standby!” they gushed.
All admirable and well-intentioned. But there’s a worrying hint of
tumbleweed as environmental policies move to the archives, and
environmental commitments fall from the board agenda.
The impact of climate change upon our lives isn’t lessening. It
would be glib for me to refer to the recent winter of floods as proof,
but the IPCC detailed the likely impact of average temperature increases
of 2 degrees or more, and it makes sobering reading. Already, it says,
climate change is negatively affecting food supplies, marine
ecosystems, sea levels, extreme weather and economic growth.
So have we literally taken our foot off the gas when it comes to
running environmentally-committed, sustainable organisations? Some
companies have been congratulated by Greenpeace for their continued
environmental commitments. Certain industries - utilities and
manufacturing for example – have made significant contributions to
cutting carbon emissions, albeit nudged towards these through stringent
regulations. Google is powering its Iowa datacentre facilities with up
to 407 megawatts of 100% renewable wind energy. Eight major renewable
energy projects have been given the go-ahead by the UK government which
include offshore wind farms and conversions of coal powered plants to
run on biomass.
But what about the rest of us? I think it’s fair to
say it’s time for a refresh. We now work within a digital landscape – an
environment almost unrecognisable to the way we used IT seven or eight
years ago, when many businesses started devising their environmental
policies. IT systems usageworldwide now equals the carbon footprint of the global airline industry, each contributing around 2% the world’s greenhouse
gas emissions. There’s a whole lot more on the agenda now that we need
to work into our policies, and that we just didn’t need to worry about
back then:
1. Digital media – Every second, two new members join LinkedIn. CIO magazine
points out that YouTube shares 6 billion hours of video a month,
Facebook 20 billion minutes of usage per day, and between us we generate
140,000 tweets per second. “That’s an awful lot of processing” says
writer Pat Brans.
2. Data – 90% of
the data in the world today has been generated over the past two years.
This isn’t just content created socially. ‘Big data’ and its management
is a hot topic in private and public sector organisations alike – and
one that wasn’t on our agenda a few years ago.
3. Cloud computing – Cloud uptake
is only going to increase, so we need to make sure we’re creating
sustainable infrastructure to cope with this – cloud computing, after
all, needs data centres. Research by the Climate Group suggests energy
consumption by data centres will account for 18% of the world’s
greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Still virtualisation, shared use of
facilities, and investment in sustainable, low-impact data centres can
only be a good thing. In fact, research has shown that moving certain business applications to the cloud can save up to 87% of IT energy.
Sourcingfocus.com,
though, suggests that many businesses are not in a position to make
their datacentre usage more efficient or environmentally- friendly “as
they lack either the skills or the will to tackle the issue, to
deactivate so-called ghost servers, or even to make use of the energy
efficiency controls on servers within the datacentre”. So whilst it’s
great that the likes of Google look to invest €150m in sustainable
datacentres, most businesses don’t have the resources to do the same.
4. Mobility and devices – 29%
of the global workforce is classified as anytime, anywhere information
workers, with the number continuing to rise as 905 million tablets are
forecast to be used by 2017. Increasingly, users own multiple devices.
We need to consider this within our environmental policies: I’m not
talking about the energy expelled in raw materials sourcing, the
component manufacturing or the actual production, but more about the
update-and-upgrade culture.
Each year 4 mobile phones per secondmake
their way into landfill in the U.S. alone, potentially leaking harmful
materials into the environment. And that’s without the mass of defunct
monitors, keyboards and handsets nesting in our offices, pushed aside
for tablets and smartphones.
UK Regulations implementing the WEEE Directive went some way towards
helping this mountain of hardware waste. It originally came into play in
January 2007 and looked at reducing the amount of Waste Electrical and
Electronic Equipment - but the world has changed since then. To put it
in perspective: this directive was launched before Apple released the
first iPhone. Since then, WEEE has been updated “to lighten the burden
on producers, simplify the bureaucracy and promote recycling best
practice” –it had been criticised for penalising producers, which didn’t
win it any friends.
Business leaders have a duty to bring ‘Green IT’ back to the board
agenda and refresh policies, processes and commitments. We need to
revisit our unified communications tools; our hardware disposal; our
power management technologies and our data centre power and cooling
methods. It’s time to recognise the part we play. Maintaining a
continued, sustainable, low-impact business is a responsibility for us
all.