More Indian Firms Turn to Green IT Date:   Thursday , August 06, 2009 Large Indian firms have started turning towards greener solutions to run their business. A survey conducted among the senior level IT executives in India reveals that the interest towards green IT has been on the upsurge in large Indian organizations. The 2009 Green IT Report by Symantec says that significant interest in green IT strategies and solutions are attributed to both cost reduction and environmental responsibility. Companies in India have started embarking on the drive to be environmentally conscious. Nearly 60 percent of the respondents from large enterprises say that they are in the planning or trial stages of a green IT strategy, while 39 percent of the firms are already in the process of implementing green IT initiatives. “Large Indian enterprises today are confronted with issues of unprecedented data explosion, burgeoning storage and complex information management processes,” says Anand Naik, Director, Systems Engineering, Symantec India. According to Naik, this situation has put tremendous pressure on IT departments and CIOs concerning management of storage utilization, power consumption costs, and energy efficiency issues. The IT executives in India report a significant increase in green IT budgets. Nearly 90 percent of respondents expect an increase in green IT budgets over the next 12 months, while 24 percent expect increase of more than 10 percent. IT professionals are also regularly deploying several key initiatives for green IT purposes. Replacing old equipment was the most popular strategy, with 88 percent reporting new energy efficient equipment as part of their strategy, followed by monitoring power consumption (83 percent), server virtualization (73 percent), and server consolidation (66 percent). Additionally, more than half (54 percent) of respondents see Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings as ‘green’ solutions.