Green IT

Green Information Technologies (Green IT) reduce the environmental impacts associated with conventional Information Technologies (IT). Examples of Green IT include energy efficient hardware and data centers, server virtualization, and monitoring systems. Green IT focuses on mitigating the material and energy burdens associated with conventional IT while meeting our information and communication demands.

With this in mind, we can kind of gather where the philosophy of Green IT comes from. Now, in order to understand green IT in today’s context, let us take a look at some of the problems that are pulling us down as a society.

1. Electronic waste

Today, companies generate a lot of electronic waste. This includes computers, laptops, batteries, chips, smartphones, silicon and a host of other waste products. All this pollute our environment greatly. Green IT involves safe disposal of electronic waste and dealing with companies who will also engage in safe disposal of their electronic waste. Adequate waste disposal methods need to be put in place in all IT departments and this actually needs to be a part of IT governance.

2. Increased energy consumption

The more we consume energy, the scarcer coal, water and other products will be. Nuclear technology has its own risks. The best we can do is to reduce energy consumption. It order to do this, companies can adopt cloud computing, instead of buying their own personal infrastructure.

Shared platforms and infrastructure help companies to reduce their greenhouse emissions & energy consumptions. It becomes our moral responsibility to choose products and services, which work towards reducing energy consumption. Cloud computing will definitely be one of the preferred options because of this.

3. Culture of replacing products, instead of repairing

A number of companies continue to replace their devices and peripherals even when it is not required. These older devices can easily be fixed and used for a few more years. Companies need to actively encourage repairing devices rather than replacing them. This is an important part of green IT. When we repair existing products, waste generated by our companies will be lesser.

4. Using low quality products

Low quality products consume more energy and emit more greenhouse gases. They might also be manufactured with unsafe and toxic materials, which do not degrade biologically. In order to avoid this, we will need to invest in high-quality and energy-efficient products, which are green and environmentally friendly.

They might prove to be expensive in the beginning but you will save a lot of money in the long term. Low quality products do not go through the standard testing protocols and some of them fail emission level tests, hazardous materials test and other such tests miserably. They are also known to drain electricity more than high quality products.