Green IT
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For most organizations, green information technology (IT) is associated with concepts like reduced energy consumption, recycling obsolete products and waste, eliminating hazardous substances and reducing carbon footprint. But green IT can also entail practices that leverage technology to reduce business travel, use of shared resources like cloud computing and resource optimization like virtualization.
CompTIA's recent study on green IT found that organizations across a wide range of industries are increasingly viewing green as a critical factor when building and evaluating their IT infrastructure. More than three-quarters (76%) of U.S. organizations have formulated at least a partial green IT strategy, compared with just 60% of organizations in last year's study.
When making IT purchase decisions, green factors into most purchases, particularly printers (87%), monitors/displays (86%), desktop PCs (85%) and laptops/notebooks/netbooks (81%). When evaluating these purchases, organizations seek technologies with reduced power consumption, power management capabilities and functionalities, recyclability and use of recycled materials. Environmentally friendly manufacturing processes and carbon offsets also factor into technology purchases.
In order to assess organizational practices and purchases as they relate to green, organizations periodically conduct green IT audits in areas such as energy consumption and power management. However, measuring the ROI of green IT is difficult - most organizations (84%) do not use specific software applications to measure these variables; many cite a lack of consistent tools and metrics for measuring green.
CompTIA's 2nd Annual Green IT Insights and Opportunities Study was fielded to 650 senior-level professionals in a range of industries from the U.S., U.K. and Germany in January 2011.
CompTIA members can read the full report here