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The Greening of IT
214 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

■ Security and business resilience approaches and best practices that
become increasingly important with the consolidation of data centers and
recentralization of systems and data while providing secure, open access
across and beyond organizational boundaries.
■ Efficient, green, and optimized infrastructures and facilities that
balance and adjust the workloads across a virtualized infrastructure and
align the power and cooling consumption with business processing
requirements across all IT and data center facilities. The result is bal-
anced energy demands to help avoid high-peak energy use and the associ-
ated higher energy billing rates and meet SLAs based on business
priorities. Through the introduction of an optimized infrastructure, the
number of systems and networks in the data center can be reduced, cost
efficiency improved, and energy efficiency enhanced.
■ Enterprise Information Architecture. Data that was typically con-
tained in disconnected, heterogeneous sources, and content silos are vir-
tualized through flexible enterprise information architecture. Therefore,
IT can deliver trusted information to people, processes, and applications
to truly optimize the business decision making and performance. ptg

Conclusions

As you’ve seen throughout this book, green IT promises a significant win
for IT: a chance to save money—and the environment. Collaboration with
governments on all levels, energy research organizations, universities, energy
utilities, IT vendors, and all the nonprofit green organizations that keep
springing up is key. And it’s not just for organizations dealing with IT.
Almost everyone worldwide can collaborate on green IT, since almost every-
one is now, or soon will be, a user of IT through PCs, the Internet, and cell
phones. We all need to contribute to energy efficiency to help solve the
climate crisis. Energy conservation will remain the best and easiest way to
save energy—and, of course, that applies to energy conservation for our IT
systems and for every other energy-consuming device we use.