The future trends of Green IT
In this article
Summary
Green IT—reducing carbon emissions from IT systems, including software—is already central to the industry’s journey toward a Net Zero future.
Though still in its early stages, the Green IT transition is accelerating, with its future closer than ever.
Future trends in green IT include an improved understanding of software’s impact on the environment;
- The global push for sustainable legislation
- AI as a challenge and solution for sustainability
- Decentralization with edge computing
- More sustainable cloud solutions
- Green coding practices
Before looking towards the future of green IT, let’s look at recent history
Green IT has been evolving over the last decade or two, in tandem with a rapidly rising demand for technology and the consequently unsustainable carbon footprint of the ICT industry. As IT’s carbon emissions continue to soar—particularly in the realm of data collection/storage and cloud-based content—the widescale adoption of green IT has never been more necessary.
To give you a sense of the scale of the problem, it’s worth remembering that, as an indirect result of the Covid-19 pandemic, global data consumption, capture, generation, and storage reached an unexpected high in 2020. It peaked at 64.2 zettabytes— that’s roughly 60 trillion or 60.000 billion gigabytes stored in data centers. You can imagine that these data centers require power to be operational. And this was in 2020.
Today, these data levels are on track to increase even further, even faster, to 181 zettabytes in 2025. That is nearly triple the peak of 2020. As of right now, 402.74 million terabytes of data are being generated every single day.
ICT is now grappling with two major challenges: meeting the surging demand for digital technology and finding efficient ways to store and process this massive volume of data.
However, the real issue lies not in the amount of data, but in the carbon emissions generated by these processes, which are contributing significantly to the worsening climate crisis. To that point, ICT is projected to produce a staggering 14% of the world’s carbon emissions by the year 2040.
It is clear that immediate action is necessary. To pave the way for a carbon-neutral future, IT must become more “green”. Enter Green IT: An essential strategy for businesses aiming to reduce their carbon footprint, adapt to changing regulations, and enhance operational efficiency.
Green IT involves many things, as IT leadership educating themselves as to the role of IT departments in reducing global carbon emissions, how this can be achieved, how green IT strategies can benefit and impact organizations, and what the future of green IT will look like.
In this article, we’ll focus on the future of green IT.
5 Green IT Trends and their implications
For IT leadership to stay ahead of the game, preparing themselves and their development teams for the transition to a more sustainable, carbon-neutral–or dare we say it even negative future–it’s good to be aware of upcoming trends in sustainable IT and the implications these may have on operations, goals, and finances.
Trend 1. The global push for sustainable legislation
In a broad legal context, sustainability in business is being driven by the introduction of landmark regulations and directives, such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
While the CSRD is a European initiative, similar legislation is emerging globally. In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is introducing climate disclosure requirements to provide investors with greater transparency. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s Sustainable Disclosure Regulation (SDR) serves a similar purpose.
Also, non-EU companies generating over €150 million annually within the EU market are also required to comply with the CSRD, broadening its impact beyond Europe.
While these regulations extend beyond IT departments, Green IT plays a crucial role in meeting sustainability goals and ensuring compliance with current and forthcoming legislation around the world.
Trend 2. AI as a challenge and solution for sustainability
Without a doubt, one of the most prominent features of our increasingly digitalized world has been the introduction and evolution of AI, or Artificial Intelligence.
However, AI and Green IT are like a double-edged sword as the technology poses as many opportunities as challenges when it comes to sustainability.
AI and exponential increases in energy usage
The energy required to design, train, deploy, and maintain AI systems is extraordinarily intensive. For example, research indicates the computational power needed to train large AI models doubles approximately every 3.4 months.
But even after the training of a model is done, just using AI systems can be very energy intensive. Compared to hardware running ‘task-specific software’, generative AI systems use, on average, around 10 times more energy (please note, that image generation uses, on average, over 60 times more energy than text generation). Not to mention the water consumed by the data centers running these systems.
But let’s look at the other side of that same coin. AI technology can be extremely helpful for Green IT too.
AI and optimizing processes
Despite being energy-intensive, AI can optimize processes and reduce inefficiencies far more quickly and effectively than humans, potentially driving improvements in energy efficiency across industries.
Over the next few years, we are likely going to witness an explosion in the applications of AI, from waste management, transportation, climate modeling, and agriculture to supply chain management, manufacturing, and data processing.
Indeed, AI applications are already being used in the fight against climate change, including for crop analysis—to increase both agricultural productivity and resilience—analysis of complex interactions between climate change and Arctic Sea ice loss, and in energy demand management.
Once trained, AI can complete an almost limitless number and variety of technical IT processes, and could also help developers to optimize the efficiency of software systems and minimize their carbon footprint.
Trend 3. Decentralization with edge computing
As we’ve already discussed in the introduction, one of the major contributors to carbon emissions and energy consumption in the IT industry is the vast amounts of data being generated, consumed, and stored every day.
Centralized data centers are currently straining under the burden of processing trillions of megabytes of data per day, which is why ‘edge computing’ is expected to play such a large part in the future of green IT.
Edge computing is a decentralized approach to data processing, where data is processed closer to its source—such as wind farms, railway systems, mobile devices, or smart city traffic lights—before being transferred to a central data center.
Edge computing means that large, centralized data centers are provided with only the most necessary or useful results of the computing work conducted at ‘the edge’—for example, real-time business insights, equipment maintenance predictions, and other such actionable answers.
As big-name IT corporations like Microsoft, Google, and Danfoss adopt edge computing strategies, we could see edge computing become the norm for data processing and transmission.
At scale, edge computing requires dramatically less data transmission and generates much less CO2, compared to current operations. Edge computing also reduces latency and the strain on existing IT infrastructure, thus requiring lower energy levels, potentially resulting in lower energy costs.
Trend 4. More sustainable cloud solutions
Speaking of data storage, there is another alternative to highly energy-consumptive centralized data centers in the form of the Cloud.
Migrating IT operations and data storage to the cloud will likely become an even more prominent feature of the global digital landscape than it already is. Yet there is a catch.
Not all cloud solutions are inherently sustainable. Future Green IT strategies must prioritize evaluating the sustainability of cloud providers.
IT leaders are increasingly prioritizing the evaluation of cloud providers’ sustainability credentials. One way of doing so is to look for providers offering ‘green zones’ powered by renewable energy.
Selecting these providers can not only reduce an organization’s carbon footprint but also put pressure on less-sustainable providers to enhance their environmental practices. If you’re considering cloud providers, consider using the ‘green optimization matrix‘ to weigh environmental impact alongside business feasibility.
Trend 5. Green coding practices
One of the key trends driving the future of Green IT is a growing awareness of the sector’s environmental impact. However, within that growing awareness there is also an aspect that is often overlooked.
Indeed, while many assume hardware drives IT’s carbon footprint, they don’t consider the role software plays.
At SCOPE 2024, Luc Brandts CEO of Software Improvement Group, emphasized that sustainable IT starts with optimizing source code for energy efficiency.
Major IT companies like IBM, for example, are currently pushing for green coding practices to be universally standardized.
As software consumption continues to grow, efficient coding practices will become even more critical for reducing carbon emissions.
As software developers and system architects become more green-tech savvy, and as climate goalposts change, it is likely that our array of sustainable IT tools and databases will constantly evolve.
IT leaders will need to stay on top of new developments in green IT, constantly learning and assessing which tools, frameworks, and strategies will best complement their IT operations.
Conclusion
Currently, IT emissions are expected to continue rising at a time when they need to decrease in order for the sector to meet international climate targets for 2030-2050, keep global warming below 1.5°C, and achieve a Net Zero future.
By embracing Green IT, organizations can achieve sustainability goals that benefit both their operations and the planet.
To learn more about how Green IT can impact your business, visit the Software Improvement Group blog today.
