Results from the Data Management Healthcheck 2010, a global survey into the healthcare industry’s ongoing strategies for managing their IT systems, found that only 25% of healthcare organisations had a specific carbon dioxide (CO2) target to reduce their carbon emissions. 29% of respondents were unaware of a CO2 target, if it did exist.
According to the research, only 16% of the IT professionals are monitoring energy consumption across their IT infrastructures on an ongoing basis against pre-set targets. Less than 3% of the respondents claimed to use a carbon-offset scheme.
John McCann, director of marketing at BridgeHead Software, said: “Prior to the recession, ‘green IT’ was definitely en vogue. Yet the survey results suggest a shift in priorities, namely that green IT is not a primary focus for healthcare IT professionals at the moment.
“Although reducing the carbon footprint from their IT infrastructures may not be not a specific objective, any green benefits certainly seem a welcome by-product of other cost-saving activities, for example, Healthcare Storage Virtualisation (HSV).
In our survey, nearly 40% of respondents said they were employing server and/or storage virtualisation to minimise the number of physical servers in use and maximise the efficiency of their existing storage assets which, in turn, delays the need for hardware upgrades.
This mindset is certainly a step in the right direction and many healthcare organisations are starting to adopt this approach. Our experience at BridgeHead Software suggests the majority of healthcare data is rarely accessed and, therefore, many healthcare organisations are spending a lot of time, effort and money attempting to keep unnecessary data online which requires not only the storage hardware itself, but also vast power consumption.”