Sustainable It Services: Advancing the Impact of Green Computing Practices

The needs of the growing information technology industry have made data centers, digital platforms and cloud computing achieve a never-before-seen growth, generating an enormous energy demand and environmental footprint. This paper follows the fundamental ideas of green computing best practices and goes further to detail how they can be converted to sustainability in IT services. With the second wave of green IT, the priority remains on cost savings and energy efficiency but second place to be addressed is the need to combine the ecological responsibility, business value, customer value as well as the societal value. It is through the critiquing of current approaches like virtualization, workload management, green power utilization, policy, and industry-driven, that this paper discusses the need to make sustainability part of the IT services. It also assesses trade-offs, offers best practice and reflects on what practices are most effective in terms of aligning IT operations with long-term corporate social responsibility and the triple bottom line framework.