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12: The Future of Green IT for Corporations 211

development activities that could truly drive business innovation. In fact,
many say they spend too much time mired down in operations and precious
little time helping the business grow. These operational issues include the
following:

■ Costs and service delivery: Time is money—and most IT departments
are forced to stretch both. There is no question that the daily expense of
managing operations is increasing, as is the cost and availability of skilled
labor. In fact, IT system administration costs have grown four-fold, and
power and cooling costs have risen eight-fold since 1996. And in today’s
data center, data volumes and network bandwidth consumed are dou-
bling every 18 months, with devices accessing data over networks dou-
bling every 2.5 years.
■ Business resiliency and security: As enterprises expand globally, organ-
izations are requiring that IT groups strengthen the security measures
they put in place to protect critical information. For good reason, enter-
prise risk management is now being integrated into corporate ratings
delivered by organizations such as Fitch, Moody’s, and Standard & Poor’s.
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At the same time, companies are demanding that users have real-time
access to this information, putting extra—and often conflicting—pres-
sure on the enterprise to be both secure and resilient in the expanding IT
environment.
■ Energy requirements: As IT grows, enterprises require greater power
and cooling capacities. In fact, energy costs related to server sprawl might
rise from less than 10 percent to 30 percent of IT budgets in the coming
years. These trends are forcing technology organizations to become more
energy efficient—to control costs while developing a flexible foundation
from which to scale.

The bottom line is that enterprises report that IT operational overhead is
reaching up to 70 percent of the overall IT budget. And that number is
growing, leaving precious few resources for new initiatives.
If you’re spending most of your time mired in day-to-day operations, it’s
difficult to evaluate and leverage new technologies available that could
streamline your IT operations and help keep your company competitive and
profitable. Yet the rate of technology adoption around us is moving at break-
neck speed, and much of it is disrupting the infrastructure status quo.
Consider some examples: In 2007, there were 3 billion mobile subscribers