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Sustainable IT leads to significant benefits

May 18, 2021

As organizations around the world look to balance their growth objectives with the need to build sustainable businesses, it is important to ensure that balance extend to the use of technology as well. While tech solutions can help solve environmental issues, IT as a whole, has a significant carbon footprint itself. For instance, data centers represented nearly 1% of the world’s energy demand in 2019.1 And the digital acceleration that we have seen during the COVID-19 pandemic will further increase the enterprise IT carbon footprint.


The tech industry is urgently addressing this critical issue. For example, Microsoft is experimenting with approaches that help reduce the energy requirements of data centers. Microsoft’s Project Natick, for instance, aims at testing the performance and energy efficiency of underwater data centers.2 But this focus on sustainable IT does not seem to be important for most organizations. We found, for instance, that 89% of organizations recycle less than 10% of their IT hardware.

This research focuses on how to make enterprise IT itself more sustainable (it does not, therefore, look in detail at how smart systems can be used to develop innovative sustainability solutions). To investigate this critical issue, we surveyed 1,00 organizations with annual revenues in excess of USD1 billion to understand their outlook when it comes to sustainable IT. We also interviewed senior IT executives, sustainability professionals, as well as senior executives from core functions such as human resources, finance, and marketing. In this research, we address the following questions:

  1. What is the impact of enterprise IT on the environment and how is it growing?
  2. To what extent are organizations aware of the environmental impact of IT?
  3. Are organizations prioritizing sustainable IT?
  4. What are the benefits of implementing sustainable IT initiatives and what are the key use cases that organizations should focus on?
  5. What is the roadmap for organizations to accelerate the implementation of sustainable IT initiatives?
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About the Provider

Capgemini
Capgemini is a global leader in consulting, digital transformation, technology and engineering services. The Group is at the forefront of innovation to address.

TOPICS

Environmental impact of IT, Sustainable IT strategy