How green is software as a service?
I was briefed Friday by Symantec's Cecily Joseph, director of corporate responsibility, and one of the things we got to talking about was a survey the company conducted back in March to get some more visibility into Green IT priorities. The research, which was conducted by Applied Research, represents 1,052 responses from enterprise IT folks including CIOs/CTOs and other senior level executives. (The survey was worldwide and 389 responses were from within the United States.)
One of the data points that intrigued me was the following: 57 percent of the respondents viewed software as a service (SaaS) as a way they could get greener in their IT organizations. More specifically, 37 percent of the respondents said they were "considering SaaS to address certain tasks for power savings." Another 20 percent indicated they were "moving aggressively to SaaS to reduce power."
Incidentally, SaaS was by no means the most primary focus of the respondents' green IT strategies. Here are the top three priorities, which were pretty equally weighted:
- Replacing old equipment (95 percent)
- Monitoring power consumption (94 percent)
- Server virtualization/consolidation (94 percent/93 percent)
Here's a copy of the entire Green IT report.
While none of these answers really were surprising, the responses about SaaS really intrigued me. Logically speaking, there's a certain amount of common sense in this theory and there are a whole lot of different ways to interpret it.
For instance, you could presume that some businesses are looking simply to outsourcing their data center activities and cut back on their power consumption in that way (which seems like the 20 percent number). Likewise, the numbers seem to suggest that some companies might be investing in managed services for controlling power consumption and other system metrics. The survey doesn't really go deep enough to tell for sure.
Of course, SaaS really only shifts power consumption elsewhere, to another data center or hosting facility. So, businesses are really looking to SaaS to move the load elsewhere. It really isn't being eliminated, when you come right down to it.
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