Why IT is cleaning up its act

It is no exaggeration to suggest that the past year has seen one of the most remarkable transformations in the IT industry’s history. Within 12 short months the IT sector has gone from one of the most environmentally irresponsible industries on the planet to perhaps the the most vocal supporter of the green business movement. That is not to suggest that IT has suddenly become a paragon of environmental virtue – how could it when a recent study showed IT kit has the same global carbon footprint as the much maligned air industry? But whereas other industries have tentatively toyed with the edges of their business models in the name of sustainability, the biggest names in the IT world have made large, quantifiable commitments to slash the environmental impact of their products and their own operations, and have already started to deliver good results.

So why has IT, which until recently had an environmental record that made strip mining look pretty conscientious, become such a champion of green business practices? And is this a durable trend or another dotcom-style boom, destined to burn itself out?

The answer to both these questions lies in the unsurprising fact that the IT industry’s interest in greener technologies is not down to its business leaders having a greater love of the environment than their counterparts in other industries. It is a result of an underlying commercial imperative that is forcing them to embrace sustainable technologies: energy.

Forget climate change – soaring electricity prices, energy security concerns, fears that oil production is peaking and pressure on power grids from rapidly expanding datacentres are the real drivers behind IT’s green conscience. As a result, the current energy efficiency IT arms race would continue even if global warming were magically solved tomorrow.

Obviously energy concerns are felt just as acutely by other industries, but where IT has an edge is that energy efficiency improvements are proving relatively easy to attain. The airline industry would love to enhance fuel efficiency by 90 per cent, but the solutions aren’t even on the drawing board yet. In contrast, IT engineers are confident that a combination of existing technologies, such as thin clients, virtualisation, mainframes and multi-core processors, and imminent next-generation technologies, such as fresh air and in-chip cooling, means they can feasibly slash IT’s energy needs by up to 90 per cent within a few years. Developing these solutions has hardly been simple, but thankfully it hasn’t, quite literally, been rocket science either.

This is of course great news for IT managers, who stand to reap the benefits of the perfect green storm engulfing the IT industry.

Implementing a truly energy-efficient, green IT department remains a challenging task - it is after all a major transformation project requiring massive server consolidation, additional software deployments and new computing models in the form of virtualisation and software-as-a-service. But the IT industry’s willingness to embrace the demands of the low carbon economy means that compared with their counterparts in other sectors, IT execs might just find the whole green business revolution is much less daunting than it first appears.