Why Green IT should be blogged about?

Following a year with record heats, multiple deadly hurricanes and typhoons, the environment is showing more and more its true colors and the effect of global warming. It is time that the environmental focus that has captured most of our industries, notably the car industry, shifts to the information technology world as well. This is why we have decided to create this blog, Yashil, to inform the world about the latest advancements in green IT and where there are still areas of great improvement.

It is worthy to start mentioning why green IT is actually important. In many ways, greener IT is linked to cleaner energy production. This however is another topic of heated discussion (see a very interesting short documentary by DeutscheWelle) and we would not like to focus on that. The focus is to make sure that the IT in itself becomes considerably more green. After all, our inefficient and high usage of IT just aggregate the demand for primary energy sources such as oil and electricity. This is why, greener IT is very important.

A study by McKinsey showed that big data centers, the massive backbone of our new economies like Facebook or Google, will produce more greenhouse gases by 2020 than the entire airline industry. Considering around 20 000 airplanes in the air at any given point in time and a per-airplane fuel consumption of 4 liters per second, we see the sheer size of the problem. IT, which is not green, will completely out-dwarf any industry we currently have. The inevitable conclusion is that our IT systems have to become a lot cleaner!

It is about finding high impact, cheap and novel solutions that keep our world comfortable but make IT much greener. All this has to play in tandem between being economical, environmental and social.

On the one hand, consumers have to become more conservative in their energy consumption. On the other hand, businesses and management also need to adopt an environment of greener IT. This goes from anything like saving costs to optimizing output. It is about managing power wisely, storing data securely and environmentally, efficiently managing processes and data and keeping up the great rate of technology advancements.

Green IT has to move to the business world and with Yashlife we will be exploring the advancements and concepts of that topic.

We are looking forward to keeping you informed about this interesting topic and let us engage you in the world of green IT as well. Please follow us on Twitter and Facebook as well.