Cuts May Cause Green IT Projects To Be Axed

Environmentally-friendly IT projects may be axed as cost-cutting measures are implemented in the current financial climate, warned Compass Management Consulting.

Despite the doom and gloom, the company put a positive spin on its report by pointing out that the slashing of budgets may yet prove to be good for sustainability awareness.

Poorly Designed Projects Lack Focus

The company said that too many first-generation, green IT projects were poorly defined and success measurement lacked focus. This has meant that the worth of these projects was not apparent when IT costs were reviewed.

“Too many green IT projects have no dollar values attached in terms of benefits to be delivered so they do not get senior people’s attention. This lack of defined fiscal benefit means that more and more projects are being quietly dropped,” said Steve Tuppen, consulting director at Compass.

Large-scale IT estates can be transformed in ways that will cut costs by 30 to 50 percent and deliver sustainability benefits, such as lower power consumption, he said. This is achieved through increased standardisation of IT services, server virtualisation, a recharge model which encourages sustainability, and recycling of old equipment.

“The greenest policy of all is to close datacentres, ship out old PCs and servers in good shape for disposal and bring in a more energy efficient estate,” Tuppen said. “There are over 130 data centres in central government alone and the government’s own ICT Strategy calls for a reduction to 10-12 facilities over the next three years,” said Tuppen.

Virtualisation, new apps

Server sprawl is not yet a thing of the past because suppliers are still being incentivised to implement new applications on new servers. An awareness of virtualisation benefits and changes in contractual details are issues that must be addressed.

One of the main lessons from the report related to energy and cloud adoption. Electricity accounts for up to 10 percent of data centre costs and significant price rises look likely in the medium term, warned the report. With this background, paying for cloud services delivered by highly efficient centralised data centres is a powerful way to persuade service providers and their customers to behave in a more sustainable way, it advised.

Earlier this week, Chancellor George Osborne announced £1 billion in funding for a Green Investment Bank, as part of efforts to make the UK a leader in the low-carbon economy. The government said this will aim to provide financial interventions to unlock significant new private investment in green infrastructure projects.