April 14, 2008 - One in five firms have incorporated a green IT agenda into their core business strategy, while a further third are set to roll out similar strategies within the next two years, according to a new CIO survey from Datamonitor. More than 75% of CIOs surveyed consider green IT an important element in their overall IT strategy - and 15% rate it as their top priority.

“Green IT is now being driven as much by an element of business strategy as by a sense of corporate social responsibility”, said Vamshi Mokshagundam, technology analyst at Datamonitor and the report’s author. “While green IT practices such as energy-efficient hardware, hosted infrastructure and data center virtualization have all been around for a while now, it is only recently that companies have begun incorporating green IT in their core business strategy."

New advances in optimization technology, coupled with tighter regulatory measures for equipment disposal and not-so-subtle nudging from green IT suppliers, are key drivers of the current trend, the report suggests.

Green virtualization: Virtualization technologies have come to be regarded as being synonymous with green, offering significant cost savings and reductions in enterprise carbon footprints. Server and storage virtualization technologies have matured during the past two to three years, to the extent that one in three companies with a green IT strategy in place already makes use of these technologies.
 
Asset disposal: Enterprises are embracing a lifecycle approach to retirement and disposal of IT hardware assets, leading to significant benefits in terms of cost savings and mitigated legal risks. Hardware refreshes are planned based on energy efficiency and components are disposed of in a safe manner: More than two-thirds of enterprises have a formal program in place to recycle their IT assets.
 
Greener suppliers: IT vendors are forging the path ahead for green IT adoption, with all major players announcing corporate initiatives in eco-friendly computing. As a result, innovations across the design, manufacturing and service realms are beginning to impact the user world in a big way. Light emitting diode (LED) and solid state disk (SSD) technologies are already hitting the mainstream, and so is the software as a service mode of application delivery, which exploits shared infrastructure.

Order Datamonitor's "2008 Trends to Watch: Green IT" here.