With much analysis of the rising cost of energy on consumers' wallets, the impact on business and particularly of IT is often overlooked.
According to research 89% of UK businesses have no insight into their IT energy bill and 76% have set no targets to reduce power consumption. As the volume of data being stored, the number of uses for it and the complexity of delivering the resulting information to the business grows, so the power demand expands - combine this with rising energy prices and costs are set to grow exponentially.
Intelligent application of both technology and applications can help ensure the surge in oil and gas prices doesn't hit your budget. Virtualisation is a growing field and as stability, cost and performance begin to deliver on the promise this can be a way to consolidate many systems into a smaller number of more efficient servers.
More fundamentally however, designing the applications the business demand in a fashion that drives efficiency at a higher level will see greater benefits - For example the application of a centralised data warehouse containing corporate information from across the business - sales, finance, operations, IT, HR - provides one source for users to get up-to-date, accurate information without the need to horde thousands of Excel spreadsheets across hundreds de-centralised file servers spread out across your IT estate. Not to mention the commercial benefits of the added context available by linking information from diverse sources throughout the business.
Supply vs. Demand - A point to ponder
Providing servers that are more efficient and applying technologies such as Virtualisation is a great low-level step, helping on the supply-side of the problem - changing behaviours to reduce demand for unnecessary servers and ad-hoc file storage is surely the bigger challenge?
References:
Surge in oil prices hits IT - Computing