Green IT Adoption Opportunities

Green IT business opportunities have grown significantly in recent years as companies increasingly recognize the many benefits of green, primarily reduced energy consumption, cost savings and improved environmental impact. As businesses grow and modernize rapidly, their carbon footprint also increases. Investing in greener technology is a major opportunity for companies to not only reduce their carbon footprints, but to save a considerable amount on energy costs. Consider: A McKinsey report predicts that data center emissions will overtake those of the world’s airlines by 2020.

When you think about the concept of green IT, what concepts come to mind? According to CompTIA’s 2^nd Annual Green IT Insights and Opportunities study, companies most commonly associate green IT with reduced energy consumption, recycling obsolete products or waste, reducing paper, eliminating hazardous substances in products, product design optimization and sustainability. But green IT also can entail practices that leverage technology to reduce business travel, use of shared resources like cloud computing, and resource optimization like virtualization. This study found that companies across a wide range of industries are increasingly viewing green as a critical factor when building and evaluating their IT infrastructure.

When making IT purchase decisions, green factors into most purchases, particularly when evaluating printers (87%), monitors/displays (86%), desktop PCs (85%), and laptops/notebooks/netbooks (81%). What green features are organizations seeking when making these purchases? Primarily, organizations want reduced power consumption, power management capabilities and functionalities, recyclability, the use of recycled materials, and environmentally friendly manufacturing processes. Power consumption is especially important given that 7 in 10 organizations consider cost savings and reduced energy consumption to be top drivers of green IT.

Companies can take several steps toward implementing a green IT strategy. The first step should be taking a baseline measurement of energy consumption. CompTIA’s green IT study found that only 16% of organizations have used an energy monitoring software. In addition to encouraging green behaviors such as recycling/reducing paper products, properly disposing of electronics, and using videoconferencing in place of travel, organizations should take the following steps:

• Invest in up-to-date IT hardware, which typically consumes less energy than older models. The Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star qualification also shows products that meet stringent energy consumption guidelines.


• End users should be familiar with the energy settings on their computers and use options that are appropriate for their function and style.


• Screen savers should be disabled. Instead, monitors should be put to sleep after periods of inactivity.


• Devices that can be completely powered off during non-work hours can be consolidated onto power strips, which should be completely unplugged during non-use to avoid drawing standby power. This only applies to non-compute devices, such as printers or chargers.


• Companies that have data centers (which consume up to 100 times the energy of typical buildings) should first determine the heat profile of the data center since cooling is an important factor. The heat profile is based on the floorplan, arrangement of servers, and types of loads for each server. A tool such as AdaptivCool’s Demand Based Cooling can help model data center heat so that a proper solution can be planned.

 Click here to read CompTIA’s 2^nd Annual Green IT Insights and Opportunities report.