Ask a CIO to tell you exactly how much power his data centers consume and therefore what it's costing to keep them running, chances are the answer will be a polite 'can't tell you.' Ask him if he'd be interested in keeping those servers humming away for less, and with reduced carbon footprint, and you better be prepared to tell him exactly how.

CIO in association with APC by Schneider Electric in a study of power savings and efficiency practices asked over 200 respected Indian corporate businesses to share information on their data center energy utilization. We found that most of the respondents are very aware of the need for more efficient energy utilization with respect to their technology infrastructure. What the study also found was that the practices in place to curtail wastage varied.

For instance, a majority of the respondents said their top-level executives, such as the chief executive officers, demonstrated an explicit intent to reducing the enterprises' carbon footprint by using power-saving methods. Yet, only about a fifth of the respondents rewarded their IT managers for putting in place practices that would save power.

The respondents cut across sectors - from retail trade to manufacturing, financial services and government. The best enterprises among them consistently affirmed they had solutions or best practices in place across a wide array of issues. Queries sought responses in areas ranging from top-executive-level backing for power saving efforts to enterprise-level audits that measured power efficiencies within the organizations.

The best also needed to have effective steps in place for regularly encouraging their workers, including IT managers and facilities managers, to adopt prudent power saving practices. The study also asked if the respondents financially rewarded their employees to encourage them to save energy costs.

Related Articles

• Lights Out at the Datacenter
• Outsourcing Your Datacenter
• Hole In Your Cloud
• Storage Virtualization: Boon or Bane?
• Data Backup: Keep it Secure

Latest Articles

• The Quiet Threat: Cyber Spies are Already in your Systems
• Responding to Security Questions Successfully
• Security Secrets the Bad Guys Don't Want You to Know
• Don't Wait for Adobe Sandboxing to Secure PDF Viewing
• The 4 Tiers of a Secure B2B Framework