Despite the continuing economic gloom, it appears that IT departments are continuing with their green IT efforts. A recent report from Forrester found that 52% of companies have a green action plan, compared to 45% in the same survey six months ago. The reason that green IT remains popular is quite clear: it saves them money. Two-thirds of companies in Forrester's survey said that the cutting energy costs was the main motivation to instituting a green IT program.
Forrester's findings are echoed in Symantec's recently published State of the Data Centre report. It found that being green in the data center was driven primarily by cost saving in 2008, and that this trend would continue into 2009. Asked why green data centers were important to their organization, over half of respondents said that they reduced electricity consumption and cooling costs. With an eye on limited budgets in 2009, most organizations planned to: recycle obsolete hardware and components (28%), reduce annual energy costs (26%) and power the data center with cleaner energy sources (23%).
Away from cost-saving green IT initiatives the picture is more mixed. Business Green is worried about the impact that the recession is having on the renewables industry, and also warns that businesses will find it difficult to launch company-wide green education and investment programs. Of course, some of this slack may be taken up in the US at least with Barack Obama's new administration pledging some $50 billion towards building a greener economy.
After a Masters in Computer Science, I decided that I preferred writing about IT rather than programming. My 20-year writing career has taken me to Hong Kong and London where I've edited and written for IT, business and electronics publications. In 2002 I co-founded Futurity Media with Stewart Baines where I continue to write about a range of topics such as unified communications, cloud computing and enterprise applications.