Green IT is about revising business processes and the ICT surroundings to reduce the consumption of energy, the organization's carbon footprint. This goes together with increasing pressure to enhance operational efficiencies along with the reduction in the processing costs. Thus, an improvement at the bottom line can also improve a companys green credentials an evolution, which is becoming both a legislative requirement as well as a competitive differentiator.

No longer directed at just gravid industries, there is growing pressure on corporates over all market spheres, and within all regions of activity, to reduce the greenhouse gases. When talking of technology, this is being transformed into an increasing list of legislative, media and industry initiatives.

At the government level, there is an increasing number of mandates, which include the ECs Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive, the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive and the Energy Star programme from the US Environmental Protection Agency, highly backed by IT suppliers such as Intel. This last program was key to the introduction of a sleeping mode to PCs and other electronic products.

Green standards at a nationwide level include Swedens TCO certification program, directed at reducing heat levels in power usage, and limiting the use of hazardous materials. Another initiative is the Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) that targets production in an effort to restrict the use of products such as lead. At the same time, EPEAT authorizes that IT production plants design electronics products so they run more effectively, need less maintenance, have a longer service life for components, and facilitate easier recycling at the disposition stage. All these actions share similarities and overlap, however they also have different focus points and can be adopted either individually, or as a total package.

Green strategies

The IT industry itself has been searching on ways to enhance ts green credentials and has ushered in a series of green programmes. Green Grid is one of such programmes, which is a set of standards formulated by a pool of manufacturers, including HP, Intel, IBM, AMD and Sun, to improve hardware efficiency and reduce the consumption of energy. The handiness of this type of checklist not only makes it easier for CIOs to evaluate the efficiency of their IT environment but also to measure the green credentials of planned upgrades or system replacements.

Last year, IBM set in motion Project Big Green, a programme directed at encouraging energy efficiency in the datacentre. Datacentres are big power consumers, both in the volume of their processing and cooling requisites, and the trend is getting worse.

Consolidation of servers help reduce processing requirements and hence the consumption of power consumption. One of the most important IT developments of recent times is virtualisation that is established to facilitate similar capabilities as the conventional datacentre, with a fraction of its power consumption not to mention the reduced maintenance and hardware costs.

The drive for cost skillfulnesses can help reduce energy savings by up to 20 %. This is being attained by removing surplus workstations and employing green inventions, such as software, which shuts down unattended PCs a non-trivial consideration as it reduces the yearly electricity bill by 75 for each PC left running overnight.

Conversely, other programmes can be used to boot up PCs at night so that routine jobs, such as upgradation of software, take benefit of off-peak electricity rates. Here, suppliers such as Google and Intel are leading the race, having joined forces in 2007 to set up the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, directed at lowering PC power consumption.

A progressively popular corporate policy is to replace global travel with video conferencing. This not only save on travel time for highly paid executives and the cost of travel itself, it also reduces carbon waste.

Telecommuting is also growing in popularity, boosted by jam packed motorways and the advent of road congestion charges. More and more businesses are turning virtual organizations with departments forming up in their employees home offices, and IT support centers that are managed remotely. This lowers both commuting emissions and provides for smaller offices with decreased heat and lighting overheads. There are, of course, price related with this type of solution, such as the requirement for more robust and complex ICT networking that in turn imparts us back to the issue of power consumption.

One way around this is to find substitute electricity supplies. A truly eco-friendly business might want to consider innovating its own power source, such as solar, geo-thermal or wind and then selling the excess back to the National Grid.

The modern new world of e-commerce was thought to lresult in a paperless and greener office. While going paperless may still be unrealistic, consumption can be lowered through centralized printing, more efficient document management, double-sided output and, the most important of all recycling.

How to rate?

Greenness has become an instrumental competitive differentiator. Businesses want to be seen by customers and prospects as being a socially responsible organization and so are including their green credentials in corporate policies and necessitating eco credentials from their IT suppliers. However, with an increasing tide of green IT solutions and services now hitting the market, how can one go about distinguishing between the good, the bad and the average when it comes to green IT credentials?

To start with, the selection demands an capability to compare specifications against the latest legislative requirements and best-practice industry standards. This, however, does not go very long. Determining how an individual supplier loads up against peers generally requires access to independent industry knowledge and a large, statistically suitable, database, which is usually available from IT benchmarking experts.

Green IT benchmarking can help identify an organization's position in the real world and what the organization requires to do to amend its green credentials.