Green IT isn't dead yet

perspective The 'green' hype seems so 'last year'.

Today's poor market conditions have re-focused business minds on survival, rather than ensuring organizations 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 organizations 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 organizations 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 organization'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 organization 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 organizations still run on the basis of a single application to a single server, so even if 50 percent of users suddenly go, it is not possible to cut IT assets associated with that usage.

Some technologies can help keep enterprise IT flexible. Virtualization 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 data center for future use. The space freed up can be blocked off, lowering cooling needs. Running the data center a few degrees warmer will further reduce energy needs. All this costs relatively little and increases green credentials.

Of course, outsourcing the data center to an external hosting company can be even greener and remove a variable cost from the organization's books. Once outsourced, the energy usage for the data center 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 virtualized 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 organization's total carbon footprint, then the better utilization rates for a shared platform should still provide benefits here, while reducing the in-house data center size and the human resources required to maintain it.

Although there are rumors 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 organization, 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 organizations but because, when faced with survival or death, the majority of organizations 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 rigor into their organizations when the times do, eventually, get better.

Clive Longbottom is principal analyst at Quocirca. He and five other analysts contribute to ZDNet Asia's sister site, Silicon.com, a regular column that seeks to demystify the latest jargon and business thinking.