Profligate IT managers facing power blackouts

Power blackouts could cause serious downtime

Businesses are not facing up to how much energy they use and IT managers are failing accurately to gauge their energy usage, according to a survey by IT consultancy DMW Group.

While more than 70 per cent of businesses are concerned about future power shortages, only seven per cent were able realistically to estimate how much energy their IT is using.

And 68 per cent of organisations did not understand the energy efficiency of their data centres.

IT's use of more power will lead to combined problems further down the line, according to Simon Williams, director at DMW Group.

"Not measuring your current IT power consumption means that many IT managers are unlikely to have a sound plan for reducing their power requirements," he said.

"Too many companies are completely underestimating the size and impact of the problem. If they continue to ignore IT's rapidly increasing use of power, they could face a double whammy of power interruptions and significant price hikes.

"The shortage of power generation capacity is predicted to cause power interruptions, which will bring down IT systems and bring many businesses to a halt."

Over two-thirds of the 100 IT managers who responded to the survey said that they had not set targets to reduce their IT energy usage, believing it was not their responsibility, or that doing so was unnecessary because they believed IT accounts for a small amount of overall power consumption.