10 December 2007
A report by environmental charity Global Action Plan (GAP) has revealed a worrying level of ignorance among UK IT departments about the amount of energy their estate consumes.
Along with the Environmental IT Leadership Team (EILT), GAP found 86 per cent of IT directors at 120 firms with a combined IT spend of over £450m did not know their carbon footprint.
"The whole industry has been very slow off the mark [to curb this growing problem]," said Trewin Restorick, director at GAP.
Ten per cent of the UK energy bill pertains to IT but through its research GAP found one third of departments did not consider the environment when purchasing IT and 56 per cent did not even see their energy bills.
"There is no pressure to consider the long term use of kit, if they haven’t got the fundamentals in place they cannot measure the cost of energy or carbon emissions," he said.
Many manufacturers were marketing their products as green but with "little substance" said Rakesh Kumar, vice president of research at Gartner, and with no industry benchmarks to compare consumption, resellers would be called upon to advise confused customers he added.
There is no doubt the issue is felt most acutely in the corporate data centre but Kumar said "it would be prudent for even small resellers to build knowledge of green issues as there will be interest from all customers next year."
Chris Gabriel, Logicalis head of solutions, which assembled EILT, said few integrators had thought about energy, adding his time was spent talking to facilities departments or those with corporate social responsibility as well as IT directors to build a picture of the power challenges facing businesses.
