Green IT for Services - Research Paper Example

Description of these reasons is an important part of this paper. It contains the present situation of the process of making IT green. It talks about the Green IT products that are already on the market. Furthermore, it also talks about the major IT companies that are spending significant volume of resources in making IT green by developing Green IT products. In addition to these, this paper includes the future of Green IT. It can be predicted that over the next few years, a lot of efforts will be made in making IT greener and this will certainly change the outlook for the industry.

Information Technology (IT), in the present global society, acts as the ‘central nervous system’ for the business organizations, governments as well as for the social infrastructures. Global communities are connected with each other by means of IT. Today business organizations are ‘Going Green’ as the societies have become more conscious about the environment which is under tremendous pressure due to massive modernization, industrialization and irresponsible deforestation throughout the world over the past few decades. . Uncontrolled consumption of electricity puts huge pressure on the financial capacity of an organization.

Such practices actually make the entire system an unsustainable one (Baroudi et al, 2009). Furthermore, in order to meet the growing demand for electricity more power plants would be in need and this would ultimately threaten the environment. Hence, it is very important to make IT green. There is hardly any general definition of ‘Green IT’. According to Gary Hird, Green IT can be seen as the collection of tactical as well as strategic initiatives that directly trims down the organizations’ carbon footprint and/or that use information technologies for reducing carbon footprint and/or that incentivize the ‘greener behavior’ by the stakeholders of the organizations (Hird, 2008).

During the last few years ‘Green IT’ has been a popular subject of research for the organizations like IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Cisco etc. These large multinational IT firms have already started to develop products which are more energy efficient and environment-friendly. There are organizations like Green Grid that assists the global IT industry in addressing the issue of energy use (Baroudi et al, 2009). It is important to notice that IT has an inherent ‘Green aspect’.

Information technologies deal with data which is a nonpolluting entity. They enable virtual client visits and virtual meetings which require relatively less energy. However, the volume of consumption varies with the nature of the industry. For instance, IT in case of airline industry consumes significantly more energy as compared to other industries (Baroudi et al, 2009).