IIA April 2010.pdf - UAE IAA

By: Fadi Sidani
Green IT
IT at the Core of office greening initiatives
A company’s IT (Information Technology)
organisation is no stranger to scrutiny when it comes
to corporate responsibility and sustainability.
As a major consumer of electricity in many
organisations and a significant producer of
waste electronics, IT has been among the
first to come under pressure to better
manage energy consumption and to
“reduce, reuse, and recycle” in
order to improve efficiency and
lessen environmental impact.
Fortunately, in improving its sustainability
performance, IT has had a lot of low-hanging
fruit to choose from, including server
consolidation, application rationalization,
procurement of energy-efficient hardware,
better printing policies, and even simple
behavioral changes such as having people
turn off the lights and shut down their
desktop computers at night. Electronic
components consume substantial amounts
of electricity and produce significant
amounts of heat – not to mention that
they often contain heavy metals and other
toxins that pose disposal issues. Clearly,
IT must play a big part in going green, if a
company is to be effective at it.
A competitive advantage
Responding to a growing wave of
investor activism, consumer demands
and regulations around environmental
sustainability, companies are looking for
ways to gain a competitive advantage
by adopting green business practices. IT
can be a catalyst for realizing short and
long-term business benefits through the
implementation of green approaches.
Green IT thus can offer a company the
opportunity to improve its financial
performance while jumpstarting green
change throughout the larger organisation
as well as reducing environmental impacts.
The areas where IT can address
sustainability issues directly are through
its acquisition, usage and disposal policies.
Consolidation and virtualization initiatives,
for example, have generated advantages
in terms of cost and operational efficiency
and also led to a reduced impact on the
environment as utilization rates reduce
energy consumption. Beyond virtualization,
as new equipment is brought in as part of
the move to denser blade configurations
and 64-bit architectures, or simply to
provide additional capacity, organisations
will also benefit from advances in processor
efficiency.
The Green Data Center at the Core of
Green IT
Finance, IT and business unit executives
in large companies around the world
have come to embrace environmentally
sustainable business practices that are
changing their IT practices in an effort
to save money, improve performance
and lessen their impact on the physical
environment.
For example, Marriott International’s
efforts to lower its IT power consumption
over the past few years have not only
resulted in greener and more sustainable
IT operations, but also serve as a risk
mitigation tool. Their data centers are
protected from nature, nuclear attacks and
electronic eavesdropping, amongst other
IT threats because of their location. The
company has built a data center 300 feet
below ground, in a former Pennsylvania
mine. The mine maintains an ambient air
temperature of 53 degrees Fahrenheit.
In addition, virtualization software from
vendors has helped the hospitality giant
reduce its server population by more than
one-third over the past three years. Storage
virtualization and archiving technologies
have enabled the company to slash its
storage energy costs by more than 50%
over that same period.
Traditionally, data centers have been
designed to store, process, manage and
exchange information in order to either
support the informational needs of large
institutions or provide application services
or management for information technology,
telecommunication, web hosting, internet
or intranet. These data centers have been
designed to accommodate energy intensive
computing equipment and the speciallydesigned
infrastructure for high electrical
power consumption, redundant and
uninterruptible power and heat dissipation.
Based on their energy signatures, large data
centers are actually more like industrial
facilities than commercial buildings. Careful
attention is usually paid to maximizing the
computing power in the traditional data
center, but often very little consideration
is given to environmental issues.
Green data centers are ecologically friendly
data centers where the mechanical,
electrical, thermal, hosted systems and
building materials are all used to improve
energy efficiency and effectively manage
any negative environmental impact. Until
recently, no one seemed to care whether
or not data centers were environmentally
friendly. Now, financial, legislative and
environmental pressures are causing data
centers to take steps toward ‘going green.’
Baby steps
Environmental improvement and
sustainability initiatives can be addressed
and implemented through basic efforts
such as the thoughtful use of technology,
a combination of high-quality financial and
operating information, useful metrics and
well-considered business cases and strong
executive commitment. But there are no
simple answers to building a sustainable
enterprise.
Companies have taken many early steps
in the first wave of green IT to lessen
their environmental impact. For example,
they have retired out-of-date systems,
consolidated data centers like the
aforementioned example and adopted
substantially more efficient hardware and
cooling systems. These early efforts have
been focused on cutting waste, decreasing
energy usage, and optimizing the efficiency
of IT assets in data centers, on desktops,
and throughout company operations.
And executives say these early steps have
yielded returns that are satisfactory or
even better.
Some companies have been particularly
ambitious in leading environmental change,
whether led by a desire to keep pace
with competitors, to avoid penalties or
bad publicity, or simply their own sense
of right and wrong. Those who adopt a
wait-and-see attitude may well be caught
short, pulled under the next wave of
green IT and forced to struggle to catch
up or even survive. Those who are well
prepared, especially those who learned the
importance of strategic investments during
the last economic downturn may well be
able to ride this wave successfully and even
flourish as a result.
Evolve into a sustainable business over
time
Although Green IT efforts have focused in
particular on increasing energy efficiency
in IT infrastructure management, e.g.
‘Green Data Centers’, this focus does
not suffice. Environmental sustainability
needs to go beyond simply improving the
energy efficiency of the IT infrastructure
– and include business solutions that
help customers move towards greater
levels of maturity in their management of
sustainability practices.
‘Smart’ companies address environmental,
economic and social factors – the three
pillars that make a company sustainable.
Namely, IT that contributes to the wellbeing
of society, contributes to preserving
natural resources and ecosystem and IT
that improves economic sustainability.
Companies can take internal steps to
improve processes and cut waste, but the
giant leap forward will come from more
environmentally sensitive solutions coming
to market for them to employ. Such
progress will allow companies to mitigate
risk and strive to be a good corporate
citizen, an employer for which people want
to work, and a company that deserves
customers’ business.
IT as the catalyst for change
IT organisations do not have to tear down
their existing data centers and start from
scratch in order to start benefiting from
environmentally friendly technologies and
processes. IT organisations just need to
start considering these in the data center
planning process. Incorporating green
thinking into plans involves everything
from purchasing energy efficient hardware
made from more environmentally friendly
materials to implementing rationalization
projects to designing new data centers and
locating them in places where they can take
advantage of alternative power or cooling
methods. The sooner data centers start
taking steps toward implementing green
technologies and processes, the sooner
they will start realizing the benefits.
No blueprint or one-size-fits-all master plan
exists. But one thing above all others is clear:
the best results will come to organisations
which include IT as an integral supporting
element of its environmental and broader
sustainability initiatives.
About the Author:
Fadi Sidani is the Partner in charge of Enterprise Risk Services
(ERS) at Deloitte in the Middle East. Fadi has 22 years of global
experience in Risk Management, Consulting and Sustainability
work across various markets, industries and business functions.
He is a regular public speaker in many forums across the ME
region, and he has been involved in the set up and delivery of
various training courses for staff and clients. For more information
please contact + 971 4 369 8999
10 April 2010 11 April 2010