Green IT isn't dead yet

The recession is dampening many areas of IT - but not environmental impact. Quocirca's Clive Longbottom looks at how cost-cutting and green go hand in hand.

The 'green' hype seems so last year. Today's poor market conditions have refocused business minds on survival, rather than ensuring organisations have a solid environmental plan. Despite this, Quocirca expects to see a lot more green messaging in the coming months.

For the majority, the focus is on how green practices can save money. If organisations can reduce energy usage, it helps it to survive - yet this is also green. Cutting down on travel is another example of an act which is both green and saves money. Expect organisations to spin many cost-savings actions as green - even when they are stretching things.

For instance, I was at a site recently where they had closed down the staff canteen to save money. The energy savings were also very good - so this can be said to be a green act. That most employees then have to leave the office to eat is their problem.

Allowing more people to work from home, or making workers redundant, lowers an organisation's overall commuter mileage, and could mean they can move from multiple offices to one central location. Great business savings - and a great green message.

And what about introducing shorter working hours? It's not the recession - we're just trying to be greener by using less energy.

So what does this mean for IT? Many of the above changes would have an impact on IT, and overall the organisation will be more supportive if tech investments are seen to be green.

IT departments will need to manage and provide the technology for remote workers - VPNs, IP phones, PCs and software. While home working is a decision for the business, IT's role in making things look green can be massive.

Downsizing can also offer opportunities for IT to show greater benefits. If a significant number of people are being laid off, there should be less IT required. However, most organisations still run on the basis of a single application to a single server, so even if 50 per cent of users suddenly go, it is not possible to cut IT assets associated with that usage.

Some technologies can help keep enterprise IT flexible. Virtualisation allows you to not only consolidate existing applications onto fewer machines but also create a far more flexible environment where application images can dynamically grow and shrink with the workload needs.

Freed-up IT hardware resources can be retired, or stored elsewhere out of the datacentre for future use. The space freed up can be blocked off, lowering cooling needs. Running the datacentre a few degrees warmer will further reduce energy needs. All this costs relatively little and increases green credentials.

Of course, outsourcing the datacentre to an external hosting company can be even greener - and remove a variable cost from the organisation's books. Once outsourced, the energy usage for the datacentre goes on to the hosting company's books, not yours - but remember to make sure that you have a solid contract in place that allows you to dictate when and how things should change.

Software as a service and other cloud services can also add to flexibility while allowing further green claims. Many cloud offerings are one-to-many, running on highly virtualised platforms. And any energy usage by the cloud vendor does not need to be taken in to account in your own calculations.

If you want to be more honest and look at your organisation's total carbon footprint, then the better utilisation rates for a shared platform should still provide benefits here - while reducing the in-house datacentre size and the human resources required to maintain it.

Although there are rumours that green is dead, it is far more likely to rise from the ashes as an emerald phoenix. The amount of greenwash in 2008 was phenomenal - but expect even more in the rest of 2009 and 2010. Whereas in 2008, there was a focus on ensuring that, at worst, any green initiative had a net zero cost to an organisation, any green thinking now has to be around how soon it will pay for itself.

This is more likely to result in real strides being made - at least at the energy level. This is not because of any idealistic investments by organisations but because, when faced with survival or death, the majority of organisations will choose to cut back wherever they can.

The fact that green provides a suitable smokescreen to hide much economic doom and gloom behind is neither here nor there - but it would be nice if people would learn from what they are doing and carry such rigour into their organisations when the times do, eventually, get better.

A leading user-facing analyst house known for its focus on the big picture, Quocirca is made up of a team of experts in technology and its business implications. The team includes Clive Longbottom, Bob Tarzey, Rob Bamforth, Louella Fernandes, Fran Howarth and Simon Perry. Their series of columns for silicon.com seeks to demystify the latest jargon and business thinking. For a full summary of the consultancy's activities, see www.quocirca.com.