I want to develop greener IT strategies and deploy greener technologies, but how do I get the support of the board?

John Madden, research director at industry analyst Ovum: Cost is a good attention grabber. Explain to your board how much this [energy] inefficient kit is costing you year over year.

Explain the implications of that; and explain to your employees that your ability to invest in other areas is impacted because of the need to invest in rising energy costs.

That should at least get the discussion going. Then you can start to point out the benefits that come with the current generation of more energy-efficient IT and cooling technologies.

The green agenda is being driven by big multinational companies. Is there a case for small organisations to embrace green IT or is it just for the big boys?

Ian Osborne, project director for trade association Intellect’s Grid Computing Now initiative: It applies to everyone. We all have electricity bills, whether it’s at home, in a small business, or a large business ­ it’s just the number of zeros on the end that tends to change. I think it’s worthwhile for any size of business to understand what its energy costs are and what it can do about that.

I have a colleague in the industry who is running a web hosting utility and she started the business on the basis that it would be at least a carbon-neutral operation.

That is a small business in itself and it is offering its service to other small firms. So I think these principles apply everywhere and they save you money everywhere.

Plenty of outsourcing companies are saying it is greener to hand over our IT to them. Surely that is just fobbing off our carbon footprint on to somebody else?

Madden: That is a risk, but a lot of the outsourcers and service providers are going through the same soul searching that many internal IT departments are going through with energy consumption and carbon emissions, just on an even bigger scale. Because of their scale they are in a good position to take steps to reduce energy consumption.

HP is a good example: it is consolidating from some 86 datacentres to six and what it’s talking about is a radically new data centre design, new cooling technologies and power consumption technologies and great energy efficiency standards.

It should then be able to fulfil some of those infrastructure and application needs for customers and do it in a more energy-efficient way than could be done internally.

Our output devices such as printers, faxes and scanners are always on and have a big environmental impact in terms of their energy and paper. Are there ways to reduce this impact?

Osborne: There are definitely things that you can do. Within our organisation, we have implemented a new plan for printing, whereby we charge for colour pages printed on the volume printers.

What we are aiming to do is to encourage a responsible attitude to the use of printing. You often see nowadays at the bottom of an email, ‘please consider the environment before printing this email’.

I sometimes wonder whether we ought to put the reminder on the email application itself that says ‘please consider the environment before you send the email’.

But I think there’s an opportunity here to think again about the costs that go into paper, how paper is used, how it’s recycled, for example. All those should be part of a responsible print strategy.

All the vendors say they have the most energy-efficient hardware. How do I distinguish between them? Is there some sort of green quality mark?

Madden: There is an industry body called The Green Grid that is trying to develop some standards. The group comprises a very interesting mix of vendors who want to move to this point because their customers are interested in it.

But at the same time they would all like nothing better than for customers to choose their servers, so it’s a matter of juggling any new standards with the need of the vendor community to promulgate their products moving forward.

I think that we are quickly moving towards developing those kinds of standards ­ a
benchmark that’s going to give consumers at least some objectivity when it comes
to assessing what vendors are telling them in terms of the energy efficiency of
their products.

There is also the Energy Star label for efficient PCs and there is also talk of an Energy Star label for servers as well.

Are there any tools out there that can be used on an ongoing basis to measure IT’s carbon footprint and the progress that we’re making as a department?

Osborne: To some extent it’s a bit of a research task at the moment to get those metrics. But there are some tools out there and I did notice IBM making an announcement recently about having a tool for monitoring energy use, so I think these tools are fast approaching.

Is there a trade-off in terms of going green and reducing power consumption and the ability to run an efficient, modern IT infrastructure?

Osborne: I gave an example earlier of a small business that is both efficient and green. It’s a green-focused web hosting service that is running for profit. I’m sure it’s going to cause some stress, particularly in the established organisations, but I’m sure it’s possible to do this.

It is just a question of thinking differently about how you plan and manage your
infrastructure.