Going green is a journey

By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist

Johannesburg, 20 Aug 2009

A few years ago only 15% of CIOs were geared to reduce their energy footprint, but this is changing as CIOs are viewing technology as an essential tool to drive business efficiency, cut costs and ultimately reduce carbon emissions.

This is according to Andrew Harrison, senior manager for Symantec systems engineering, and chairman of the ITWeb Green IT Summit held at The Campus in Bryanston this week.

He said wastage is not new. “In the UK, 20% of food coming from retailers ends up in the landfill. The wastage is about £16 billion (R210 billion), that's much more than what we give to third world development. In the future, businesses are going to have to demonstrate compliance of green programmes.”

According to Harrison, this year more than 80% of IT organisations have strategies in place to reduce carbon emissions and save power.

Green banking

Nedbank is well-known for its green affinity programme which supports environmental initiatives. However, Nedbank is not only supporting external programmes, but internal projects as well. Nedbank's goal is to reduce its overall carbon footprint by 12% by 2015.

Maseda Ratshikuni, Nedbank senior marketing manager, gave an overview of the implications of green IT for the banking sector. He said 60% of Nedbank's power consumption stems from IT. Nedbank processes 680 000 transactions via its ATMs each month, and the bank is in the process of charging for receipts, to encourage people not to print them.

According to Ratshikuni, energy costs are rising and they will be going up 30% on an ongoing basis. “The data centre infrastructure is being taxed. One of the biggest challenges that businesses face is that 50% of current data centres will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demands of high density IT equipment.”

Ratshikuni added that technology such as unified communications and telepresence is an enabler for greener business: “Going green is a long-term journey. Some of the benefits of green IT is meeting targets to reduce the carbon footprint, supporting corporate social responsibility, reducing the cost of IT, enhancing the brand, improving utilisation of IT assets, and potential income streams through carbon trading.”