The challenges of implementing green IT

Green IT is become one of the top priorities of CIOs and managers at companies. There are however several challenges that they face in implementing green IT. The challenges vary from difficulty in incorporating a green culture to the ever-growing demand of IT. What are these challenges?

According to Catherine Doran at Network Rail, one of the most important challenges is to incorporate a green culture that motivates the staff to play their part. Also, to consider environmental issues when designing and developing new systems. While this is arguably not easy, there are solutions that do not require a lot of effort. A notable example is the green printing solutions Yashilife looked at a few days ago.

For Steve Lamey at HMRC, it is crucial to influence hardware and infrastructure suppliers of IT equipment to reduce the costs across the entire supply chain. He argues that IT is estimated to contribute 2% of the world's CO2 emissions and its growing exponentially.

A recent study from Microsoft, shows that companies that run their applications in the cloud can reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by 30% or more rather than running those applications on their own infrastructure.

Steve Wexler addresses the main challenge of Green IT when he explains that the most difficult issue is to establish a measurement and reporting format that accurately and fairly represents data center efficiency which can be easily compared to other data centers. This is currently presenting another challenge to cloud computing as the industry needs to establish agreements on what should be measured and how often.

It is expected that sooner or later every organization will go green, and cloud computing will play a major role in this.

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