Outsourcing will help businesses prepare for environmental legislation

By not continually addressing the environmental impact of their IT operations, businesses are storing up and merely compounding future problems.

Geoff Dowell, Rackspace Managed Hosting spokesman for the South African market, says a white paper from research house IDC commissioned by the company arrived at this finding.

The paper encourages businesses to look to outsourcing as a means of minimising the risks attached to future environmental legislation, while at the same time improving service and cutting costs.

In the white paper, James Eibisch, Research Director at IDC`s European Telecoms & Networking Group, said: "Today around 50% of companies host their Web sites and e-business infrastructure in-house, yet by outsourcing they can offload much of the uncertainty of future environmental legislation and regulation to a third-party, resulting in a reduction in long-term risk to the company."

Gartner analysts calculate that ICT accounts for 2% of global CO2 emissions, equivalent to the amount produced by the aviation industry. Dowell says this is a significant contribution to carbon emissions and points out that the white paper encourages businesses to look at managed hosting providers with a defined environmental strategy.

"Hosting providers can exploit economies of scale by sharing data centre infrastructure across customers, thereby reducing overall power consumption and environmental impact.

"Providers such as Rackspace that have made an environmental commitment can go further by prioritising the use of renewable energy sources, power-efficient servers, efficient cooling systems, and green data centre design practices."

The paper highlights the current drive toward "green IT", which places further pressure on data centre efficiency issues, resulting in groups being created to guide businesses on these efficiency issues. For example, the Green Grid proposes the use of metrics such as power usage effectiveness (PUE), developed by HP to provide a holistic view of data centre efficiency.

Dowell says businesses in Britain cannot escape from the environmental impact of their operations. "The white paper highlighted the fact that while today the EU would like the IT industry to regulate itself, this will not be the status quo for the foreseeable future. South African companies must also prepare themselves for similar accountability."

Current legislation concentrates on areas such as materials and recycling, but Dowell adds that high-level discussions between the EU and NGOs are taking place to extend environmental regulations to IT and communications, so companies will have to start now to examine the possible impacts and the risks that may apply to them in future.

"Some companies have already formed green committees and are taking the green initiatives and status of their technology suppliers very seriously," says Dowell. "We share that commitment with them and are continually seeking ways of reducing the environmental impact of Web hosting."

Dowell adds that the hosting market has come a long way in the last few years, with specialist players not only providing a reliable, efficient outsourcing option for Web services and e-business infrastructure, but also added environmental benefits.

"The decision to outsource based only on old business pressures needs to move forward and also consider changes in IT infrastructure to face new challenges, such as green IT."

Earlier this year Rackspace announced it was moving to a new data centre that will run on environmentally friendly energy to help reduce the company`s dependency on fossil fuel, as well as provide a more efficient way to manage customers` needs.