What comes to mind when asked, 'What does green mean to your organization?'
To most public sector agencies, 'green' means increased energy efficiency in their data centres, according to a recent global survey released by Symantec Corp.
"When we asked, 'What does green mean?' over half of the respondents said that increasing efficiency of energy use was a critical or high priority for them," said Sean Derrington, director of storage management at Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec Corp.
Canadian respondents to the survey rated increasing energy efficiency as a high priority in the data centre, cited by 35 per cent. More than half, or 57 per cent, of Canadian managers said they are "somewhat" familiar with the concept of a green data centre.
Public sector respondents from the U.S. (no Canadian public sector data available from the survey at press time), which comprised 30 per cent of all U.S.-based respondents, mostly have an understanding of what green means with respect to the data centre, said Derrington.
There is, however, a big difference when it comes to what they are "actually doing about it," said Derrington.
According to survey results, 59 per cent of public sector respondents in the U.S. don't have a green policy, while 35 per cent said they have a green policy. On a global average, 48 per cent of respondents, both in public and private sector, have a green policy in place.
"(The public sector) view green as being energy efficient, but yet they don't have a policy for green data centres. As well, they are very familiar with the concepts of green data centre, but yet they don't have a green policy," the Symantec executive said.
Lack of policies that pertain to a green agenda is a similar challenge being faced by the Canadian public sector, according to Alison Brooks, senior analyst for government insights at Toronto-based IDC Canada. And it's not just on green technology alone, but on the overall green procurement in the public sector, she added.
"There's some smattering of movement towards green transformation and procurement reform on a regional basis," Brooks said. "But there hasn't been like a holistic, overarching, pan-national movement that's been adopted yet, despite the fact that there's a bunch of hotspots." She cited British Columbia's zero carbon footprint commitment and the federal government's commitment "at least to the green agenda" as some of the few indications of a green strategy from the government.
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Based on IDC Canada's recent survey of 107 public sector respondents, 58 per cent indicated that there are currently no law, policy or regulation in place to promote government green procurement as a whole, including green IT.
Fifteen per cent of the IDC respondents believe the green procurement policy is embedded in the overall environmental protection policies of government, said Brooks.
The lack of policy also means there is no quantifiable way to measure green procurement efforts by the government, said Brooks, noting that 78 per cent of the respondents said there were no real mechanisms in place to track green procurement efforts.
"From an organizational perspective, you can't really manage what you can't monitor and you can't monitor if you've got no metrics," the IDC analyst said.
The lack of metrics, however, is not an indication that the government, in all three levels, is not engaging at all in environmentally friendly purchasing initiatives, she said, adding that government has the potential of making a significant difference when it comes to green IT.
"Financial services and government are the two biggest vertical buyers of IT in the country so they've got a lot of leverage there vis-C -vis their vendors and their own corporate social responsibility," Brooks said.
The Symantec report cited server consolidation and server virtualization as the top two approaches to establishing a green data centre, cited by 69 per cent and 71 per cent of public sector respondents, respectively.
But the green angle is only one of the reasons for implementing energy efficiency in the data centre, said Symantec's Derrington.
According to the Symantec survey, 56 per cent of public sector respondents cited "green" as only one of many reasons for server consolidation and server virtualization.
The same may be true for Canadian governments, where data centre consolidation initiatives are being driven by the objective of reducing cost, and not necessarily by a green strategy.
"Number one driver (for data centre consolidation) is cost-reduction," said Brooks. "Really, the true pressure and the heat is in the cost issues that surface as a result of the energy factors, (as data centres are) getting more expensive to operate."
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