This guide was written specifically to help cost-conscious, environmentally-minded organisations identify practical and straightforward ways of reducing both the corporate cost base and their carbon footprint.

There is a range of views about what, exactly, Green IT is. At the heart of the debate about the environmental role of IT, there is usually an acknowledgement that the world’s information and communications technologies consume a growing amount of power and have a measurably significant carbon footprint; and that more and more people in the industrialised world today actually work in and from offices which, themselves, have a significant carbon footprint.

Regardless of one’s individual position or the reality of the argument about the causes of global climate change, there are a number of aspects of modern office practice which contribute to the problem. It is equally clear that changes in these practices can have beneficial commercial impacts as well as contributing to ‘saving the planet’.

As consumers become more concerned about the planetary future, green organisations are increasingly better positioned to win market share; an active environmental awareness is also more in tune with the expectations of today’s workforce, many of whom are already accustomed in their daily life to applying the environmental mantra of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.


While all organisations must be cognisant of a growing range of environmental IT regulations, what we call Green IT Compliance, a green office is also a cost-effective office. The deployment of green initiatives is likely to have a directly beneficial impact on the corporate bottom line.


Written by Alan Calder who is a leading author on information security and IT governance issues. He is Chief Executive of IT Governance Limited, the one-stop-shop for books, tools, training and consultancy on Governance, Risk Management and Compliance. He is also Chairman of the Board of Directors of CEME, a public-private sector skills partnership, and a non-executive director of The Outsourced Training Company, both of which are ISO14001-certified organisations.