The Virtuous Triangle of Green IT

As more and more organisations implement successful sustainable computing initiatives, an increasingly holistic view of Green IT is emerging, comprising three different but entirely complimentary aspects:
• Firstly, IT operations need to significantly reduce their energy consumption – to minimise their own emissions and deliver essential efficiency gains for increasingly complex systems.
• Secondly, organisations need to explore the potential of IT and other new technologies to facilitate greener processes across the rest of the enterprise, For example, through mobile working, on-line resources, teleconferencing, electronic document management, and sustainable business processes, that consider the whole-life business process environmental impact.
• Finally, new IT applications and industry standards need to be developed to effectively measure, monitor and control environmental impacts across the enterprise – to provide reliable information for decision-making, scenario modelling and outcome validation.


This ’Virtuous Triangle’ of Green IT goes well beyond the simple cost-saving benefits that have always been apparent, evolving the role of IT to become a key enabler for more sustainable business as a whole.