Effective Green IT strategies for business leaders
In this article
Summary
The carbon footprint of the IT sector is rapidly increasing, if things don’t change, IT’s emissions could contribute up to 14% of global emissions by 2040. This blog highlights five approaches to Green IT that can help IT departments reduce emissions and meet sustainability regulations, including the European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
As IT departments work to comply with CSRD and other sustainability regulations, many face challenges in the technical aspects of implementation. We’ve written this article to showcase how adopting Green IT practices can help your organization meet sustainability goals while also creating opportunities for long-term business growth.
In this article, we’ve identified five areas in which Green IT can help limit carbon emissions:
- Understanding software’s critical role
- Making software development sustainable
- Investing in green technology
- Optimizing IT infrastructure
- Enabling sustainable IT procurement
Introduction: The growing environmental challenge in IT operations
Demand for digital technology has been increasing steadily for the past few decades, and this trend is only set to accelerate into the next few. However, with the rise in demand for tech, the ICT industry’s carbon footprint has grown exponentially.
As of 2020, the industry was already responsible for roughly the same amount of carbon emissions as the entire aviation industry combined. Today it has risen to claim the ignominious trophy of “seventh most polluting industry in the world,” using enough electricity to be considered the world’s 3rd most energy-intensive country.
Moreover, with the rise of AI, this energy consumption is likely to increase unfettered, given that the amount used to train large language models (LLMs) has been increasing exponentially with a 3.4-month doubling time on average.
If things don’t change, it is predicted that Information and Communications Technology will be responsible for 14% of the world’s global carbon emissions come 2040.
How these projections are changing IT
Today, new sustainability regulations—such as CSRD in the EU, SDR in the UK, and SEC in the USA—are pushing companies to act by requiring them to report on their environmental impact and reduce emissions toward Net Zero.
These directives align with regional and national carbon reduction goals, such as the European New Green Deal and the Paris Climate Agreement.
Recognizing the importance of these goals, organizations are beginning to set ambitious carbon reduction targets. Meeting these targets will benefit both the environment and business performance. Failing to meet them could have serious consequences.
Of course, reducing the carbon footprint of IT—and complying with sustainability business regulations at the same time—can be tricky. Approximately 64% of organizations reporting for the CSRD find the technical complexity to be a significant challenge.
PwC found that 74% of organizations find it technically challenging to implement CSRD requirements because they need to consider the entire value chain.
What IT leadership can do to drive sustainability in their IT operations
The IT industry is currently facing a crucial decision point, as it must find a balance between the increasing demand for sustainability and the necessity for tangible action. Both IT leaders and non-technical leaders play an essential role in addressing the complexities of systems and business implications in a way that is understandable to everyone.
Having a clear Green IT strategy that balances environmental, and business needs is essential to ensure long-term profitability and sustainability.
The role of green IT in mitigating environmental impact
So, what is Green IT?
The name itself is pretty self-explanatory, it aims to significantly reduce the carbon emissions of IT to sustainable levels.
Green IT is also known as green computing or sustainable IT and comprises a diversity of different strategies and techniques designed to raise the efficiency and lower the emissions of every aspect of IT operations—from coding and hardware procurement to cloud migration and recycling e-waste.
We’ve identified five major areas in which Green IT can help limit carbon emissions:
- Understanding software’s critical role
- Making software development sustainable
- Investing in green technology
- Optimizing IT infrastructure
- Enabling sustainable IT procurement
1) Understanding the critical role of software in Green IT
The first key strategy of green IT is simply to understand the contribution that software—not hardware—has toward your IT operations’ carbon footprint.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s not just hardware that contributes to emissions—software quality, structure, and efficiency also play a major role. These factors determine how energy-intensive it is to write, maintain, and run applications on end-user devices.
2) Energy-efficient software development
An important –and often overlooked– aspect of a green IT strategy is making software development more energy efficient.
The idea is to prioritize simplicity and efficiency at each step of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). More efficient software design reduces the energy required to maintain and run it. Engineers can achieve this by prioritizing sustainable techniques, such as:
- Selecting more energy-efficient programming languages: Research shows Java is 38 times more energy efficient than Python.
- Using green IT tools and frameworks to measure and reduce software’s carbon footprint.
During our recent IT-leadership event SCOPE 2024, our CEO Luc Brandts, highlighted that Green IT can cut energy use by up to 90% in some cases.
3) Prioritizing green technology investments
Following a focus on green coding practices is the prioritization of sustainable technology investments.
IT leadership must weigh the environmental benefits of green investments alongside their financial implications. Investing in green technology can improve cost, scalability, and performance. As McKinsey Digital experts emphasize: “Achieving green impact doesn’t mean increasing costs or sacrificing profit.
Data-driven decision making
It’s pretty straightforward: if you want to change something, you first need to know which parts need changing. The importance of accurate data measurement cannot be overstated.
In addition to aiding with regulatory compliance, the beauty of data measurement practices is that they can also assist with decision-making.
When choosing between different options, investments, or business decisions, for example, IT leadership should weigh up the environmental impact of each against its potential business impact, cost, and feasibility, all in the context of the organization’s carbon reduction goals. This is something McKinsey aptly calls the ‘green prioritization matrix.’
Investing in sustainable technology can reduce environmental impact and improve business outcomes. McKinsey’s green prioritization matrix can help IT leaders balance environmental, business, and financial considerations when making decisions.
It ranks different green-tech solutions based on three factors: their environmental impact (how much they reduce carbon emissions), their business impact (how much they can save or grow the company), and their feasibility (how easy or costly they are to implement).
4) Optimizing IT infrastructure
Optimizing IT infrastructure is key to reducing your organization’s carbon footprint. This can involve changing energy sources for software development, choosing renewable energy-powered data centers, and selecting utility companies that prioritize renewables.
Adopting renewable energy
There are many ways in which you can optimize the energy infrastructure of your IT operations. Here are a few of the most impactful:
- Make software more carbon-aware by utilizing computing power when renewable energy is plentiful and reducing usage when fossil fuels are the primary energy source.
- Transition data centers to regions that use and/or generate a higher percentage of renewable energy.
- Switch energy suppliers to utility companies that use only (or mostly) renewable energy.
- When working with third-party companies, choose those that operate using renewable energy, or that prioritize renewables in other ways—such as Apple, Microsoft, and Meta have been known to.
Migration to the cloud
Unfortunately, it’s not enough to stop optimizing the energy efficiency of your IT infrastructure. The devices your customers and application end-users use—i.e., smartphones, computers, tablets, printers—will also contribute to your value chain’s carbon footprint.
In fact, McKinsey analysis showed that end-user devices generate 1.5 to 2.0 times more carbon globally than data centers. The same analysis provided a solution to this problem, suggesting that migration to the cloud could be a much more cost-effective and sustainable means of reducing your dependency on fossil fuel electricity, and could help you majorly offset the energy required to store end-user data for your applications.
For example, many cloud providers now offer green zones powered by renewable energy, allowing IT departments to reduce their carbon footprint by moving workloads to these regions.
When considering cloud migration, it’s important to assess the sustainability credentials of various cloud providers before deciding and seeing if and how you can measure the carbon footprint of your cloud usage. For example, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft’s Azure all offer Cloud Carbon Footprint tooling.
5) Enabling sustainable IT procurement
The fifth key aspect of a green IT strategy we think leaders should consider is the concept of ‘sustainable IT procurement.’
In other words, the things you procure for your IT operations—vendor contracts, hardware, cloud services, etc.—should both be sourced sustainably and be designed or constructed as sustainably as possible, too.
For example:
Set software sustainability requirements
Think of KPIs for energy usage and CO2 consumption. Set explicit Non-functional requirements so that software adheres to Sustainability by Design and Sustainability is not an afterthought.
Selecting sustainable vendors
Contracts with software vendors and vendors of media libraries, codebases, and the like should be procured following an assessment of their offering(s) using the green prioritization matrix.
Hardware lifecycle management
Lastly, IT procurement teams need to extend the lifespan of the hardware their organization uses. This is made possible by factors including:
- Procurement of only the hardware necessary for one’s IT operations
- Purchasing hardware that is energy-efficient and manufactured as sustainably as possible (i.e., using recycled parts and/or by a local manufacturer)
- Striving to keep hardware in use for as long as possible before recycling it
- 80% of a smartphone’s carbon footprint, for example, is generated during manufacturing. Thus, the longer you can keep that piece of hardware operational before replacing and recycling it, the lower your annual emissions.
Measuring and reporting sustainability in IT
Environmental reporting is a critical component of reducing your IT operations’ impact, as data collection, measurement, and assessment are essential for regulatory compliance.
In another article, you can read more about CSRD compliance through the lens of IT departments.
Beyond compliance, measurement is also vital because:
- Without it, you cannot effectively assess your current position and therefore set achievable, reasonable, and effective carbon reduction goals and KPIs.
- Customers demand it, employees demand it, and investors demand it.
Building a culture of sustainability in IT
IT leaders play an essential role in fostering a culture of sustainability within their organization.
For most software development firms, integrating sustainability and regulatory compliance represents a dramatic shift in the way they operate. As such, IT leaders will be responsible for managing the green transition through retraining and environmental education, as well as the establishment and adherence to carbon-reduction KPIs.
Sustainability KPIs help to keep IT organizations on track when implementing green IT strategies, whilst education of the workforce entails retraining in eco-friendly development practices and providing relatable motivations for doing so—such as the improvement of application performance, time-to-market, cost, efficiency, and overall software quality.
Conclusion: Recapping leadership's role in driving green IT success
The role of IT leadership in driving down their organization’s carbon emissions through Green IT is multifaceted.
It requires a blend of strategic management, comprehensive training, continuous education, and the implementation of measurement frameworks alongside green software development practices. Additionally, IT leaders must prioritize investments in green technology and sustainable procurement.
To be truly effective, a holistic approach to Green IT implementation is essential. IT leaders need to recognize that every strategy and decision carries a broad spectrum of impacts—operational, financial, reputational, and environmental.
By embracing this comprehensive mindset, IT leaders can not only meet sustainability goals but also drive positive business outcomes that position their organizations as responsible and forward-thinking industry leaders.
To discover more about green IT, sustainability reporting compliance, and the benefits of both meeting your business and environmental goals, visit the SIG blog today.
