Green IT for Sustainable Business Practice - Sustainable Working Practices

An appropriate mantra for any organisation committed to Green IT should be " Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". Organisations should use the Green IT programme as an ideal opportunity to reduce the amount of legacy IT equipment that is currently installed on their infrastructure. Replacement of older PCs with Energy efficient (Gold EPEAT rating) PCs should be considered, and if this is not financially or logistically viable at least replace any old CRT terminals that are still in use with far more efficient LCD models. In recent tests, the average energy usage of a traditional 20-inch CRT VGA monitor was sixty three percent higher than a 20-inch wide-screen LCD monitor. Another option for organisations may be to upgrade from a cold cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) to a light-emitting diode (LED).

Another consideration for organisations is to reduce the number of PCs that exist on their infrastructure by ensuring they only provide one PC per user. In fact many organisations are implementing PC sharing schemes to reduce the PC estate to less than one PC per user. This initiative is becoming more viable and accepted especially as modern workforces nowadays tend to be more fluid than static and job-sharing schemes become more popular. Away from the workplace, users are already used to sharing PCs, for example when visiting libraries and internet cafes. It is essential of course that security issues are identified and addressed. Whenever an individual uses a computer, its cookies, browser history and other settings save the information that has been accessed. It is therefore essential that all the files and settings are deleted once the user logs off, and before the next user accesses the machine. To ensure the user's data and files are kept safe a robust password and data access process needs to be implemented.

There are many different ways in which an organisation can reuse unwanted, retired or legacy infrastructure. A best practice Asset and Configuration Management process will assist an organisation in identifying where assets can be re-assigned and reused. As we have already discussed earlier in the book, a popular practice is the passing on of unwanted infrastructure to schools or charitable organisations. This is an initiative that organisations may wish to manage themselves or carry out using a specialist 3rd party, for example Computer Aid.

In addition to reusing infrastructure, organisations should also consider recycling the remaining infrastructure that cannot be reused. To enable more effective and efficient recycling, organisations should only source electrical products that are designed so they can be easily disassembled to component level, using universally available tools. The ultimate aim for any organisation is to ensure no electronic or electrical waste is disposed of in a landfill site.

1) Virtualisation to Support Green IT

At its simplest level, virtualisation allows you to have two or more computers, running two or more completely different environments, on one piece of hardware. For example, with virtualisation you can have two different Operating Systems on one system; alternatively, you could host a MS Windows XP desktop and a MS Windows Vista desktop on one workstation. Virtualisation essentially decouples users and applications from the specific hardware characteristics of the systems they use.

2) Data Centre Management and Improvement

IT data centres are potentially the largest contributor to an organisation’s carbon footprint and must become more efficient if organisations are going to reduce their overall environmental impact.

Further research has indicated that electricity consumed in data centres, including enterprise servers, ICT equipment, cooling equipment and power equipment, is expected to contribute substantially to the electricity consumed in commercial sector in the near future. Western European electricity consumption of data centres has been estimated at 56 TWh/year in 2007 and is projected to increase to 104 TWh/year by 2020.

The projected energy consumption rise poses a problem for European Union energy and environmental policies. It is important that the energy efficiency of data centres is maximised to ensure that the carbon emissions and other impacts, such as the strain on infrastructure associated with increases in energy consumption, are mitigated.