Description

It is becoming widely understood that the way in which we are behaving as a society is environmentally unsustainable, causing irreparable damage to our planet. Rising energy prices, together with government-imposed levies on carbon production, are increasingly impacting on the cost of doing business, making many current business practices economically unsustainable. It is becoming progressively more important for all businesses to act (and to be seen to act) in an environmentally responsible manner, both to fulfil their legal and moral obligations, but also to enhance the brand and to improve corporate image. Companies are competing in an increasingly ‘green’ market, and must avoid the real and growing financial penalties that are increasingly being levied against carbon production. IT has a large part to play in all this. With the increasing drive towards centralised mega data centres alongside the huge growth in power hungry blade technologies in some companies, and with a shift to an equally power-hungry distributed architecture in others, the IT function of business is driving an exponentialincrease in demand for energy, and, along with it, is having to bear the associated cost increases.