Regulatory Push To Induce Companies To Embrace Green Computing
As President Obama pointed out in his State of the union address on 28th January, “Climate change is a fact” and hence more Government policies and incentives designed to nudge the general population towards use of computing technologies in ways and means which will leave a relatively smaller carbon foot print on the global ecology can be expected.
U.S Governments Regulatory Support
U.S governmental agencies have already brought in a slew of green computing standards like “The Energy Star, Reduction of Hazardous Substances and Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment Directive” with the primary goal of mandating a systematic decrease in the production and disposal of various forms of e-waste, be it in the form of obsolete smart phones to old legacy server machines which are out of support and have passed their sell by date.
IT Vendors Embrace Greentec Systems
IT vendors like IBM, and Netapp have aligned to the changing regulatory requirements by bringing out new technologies including green servers and laptops and linking these new solutions to reduced cost of ownership and enhanced adherence to green computing policy initiatives as a corporate entity. These cost savings are being achieved by investing more into R&D for developing hardware which consume significantly less power to operate in maintain in comparison to previous models. The idea behind this move is to reduce the power consumption, there by significantly reduce the carbon emission footprint involved in production and consumption of power. When corporate track and document this saving of power, it can lead to a big corpus of carbon credits being built and can be traded in for several federal and state government run initiatives currently being run to promote voluntary adherence to green computing policies.
Makes Financial Sense To Enterprises
Recent research has estimated that of the annual spend of close to $250 billion on providing electricity to computing machines in Tier 3 data centres; only 15 percent is actually spent on the actual process of computing. A significantly large amount is spent on the auxiliary support systems like lighting and air-conditioning and security apparatus that supports these data centres.
Hence is it imperative that corporations realize the benefits to their bottom line and the huge collateral benefits of good press they would be able to leverage, by making a more pronounced commitment to move towards green technology solutions.