Virtually Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

A few years ago, Nicholas Carr (a former editor of Harvard Business Review) set the cat amongst the pigeons with his thought-provoking book – Does IT Matter. With this book, Nicholas Carr forced us to re-examine some of our most basic assumptions about IT and business value and now he’s at it again with the revelation that an avatar, a virtual persona in the Second Life online world, consumes as much electricity as the average citizen of Brazil. You can read the full story here.

Everyone in IT knows that they have a key role to play in reducing the carbon footprint of their desktop and datacentre operations. The amount of savings possible in power consumption and emissions are quite staggering. According to Gartner, IT accounts for about 2 percent of CO2 emissions - the same proportion as the aviation industry - with PCs being responsible for 40% of the total carbon emitted.

One of the key technology solutions that can help to reduce the overall cost of IT operations is virtualisation. This is an area where Microsoft is developing capabilities to help reduce operating costs (particularly power consumption) and the carbon footprint of IT from the desktop to the datacentre. You can find out more about the Microsoft approach to virtualisation here.

Posted by Ian