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The use of IT equipment is currently on a par with air travel in terms of its carbon footprint. That’s just around two per cent, according to figures from analyst house Gartner, placing it well below contributing factors such as farming and manufacturing but still clearly cause for concern.

As a result, there are a lot of technology companies feeling a need to act. But I fear many are simply putting stickers on pieces of kit or software claiming ‘green’ benefits, because ‘green is the new black’.

Perhaps some of these claims are underpinned by genuine green improvements. But I would suggest the piecemeal improvements of a tweak here and a tweak there to PCs and servers is in no way ‘wholesale’ enough.

Instead we need a fundamental shift in the whole model of IT use.

Cloud computing - or software-as-a-service - not only offers a more effective way of using IT but it also promises energy savings and therefore very real environmental benefits.
Let me explain. If you have a hundred households watching a hundred television sets with a hundred set top boxes all plugged into the mains, then a lot of energy is being consumed. And as we all know now that isn’t great for the environment.

But what if every time you had a hundred people who all wanted to watch the same programme they were all able to switch off 99 of those set top boxes? Clearly you would see a major reduction in energy consumption.

Well, the same situation of efficiency gain is playing out in the world of IT.

For too long now the norm has been for companies to run their applications on servers and PCs on-premise - situated in and around their offices and every business believing it must maintain its own infrastructure.  Often those servers are working very inefficiently. Often there are also separate servers for each different business function, all running sub-optimally. There are offices around the world full of power-hungry machines working far harder than they need to.

But what if one data centre with hundreds of servers all running optimally, ran all those applications for tens of thousands of businesses, with multiple ‘tenants’ on each server?

You would see a reduction in the power consumption related to computing.

This is now a rapidly maturing model of computing that many businesses are moving to, accessing applications over the internet with few or no on-premise servers supporting them. And over time the data centres at the heart of the proposition are benefiting from economies of scale when it comes to making them more energy efficient. Of course data centres still consume a large amount of energy but compared to a far higher number of servers spread across hundreds of offices the benefits are clear.

Another major benefit of this cloud approach - or software-as-a-service - is that management of applications is centralised and tended to by a third party. This means updates are pushed out automatically in the data centre so they work the next time a user logs on. This way there is no need to leave machines on overnight in order for updates to be installed.

There are hugely compelling reasons, such as ease of use, flexibility and faster return-on-investment, why businesses would choose the software-as-a-service model. Realistically it is those benefits which will always prove most influential for businesses but while ‘going green’ is high on the agenda the fact there are also environmental benefits to making the switch is a tremendous bonus.

There are more indirect bonuses as well with tangible green benefits. If staff can access mission critical applications and collaborate with one another anywhere they have an internet connection then business travel can be limited to the essential, removing a requirement for face-to-face meetings.

It is often assumed ‘going green’ would be more expensive and often a compromise on other factors but where IT is involved, because energy saving and workforce efficiency are so central, the truth is ‘going green’ can often save money as well as revolutionise a business.

By Lindsey Armstrong, president EMEA, salesforce.com

Tags: Cloud Computing, Global warming, google, Salesforce