Information Technology Forecast for 2010

Financial forecasts for 2010 estimate that the information technology and data center industries may grow as much as 20 – 25% during the year given the ever-increasing demand and customer base.

While the daily focus for these companies will continue to be resolving reliability and rapidly controlling energy costs, there are environmental, health and safety compliance, and stewardship considerations that pose potential threats to operations and public relations. Critical data center operating equipment such as diesel back-up generators and storage tanks, cooling towers, and chillers housing refrigerant may have adverse environmental impacts if they are not managed appropriately.

Environmental permitting and environmental management system (EMS) automation will be key to environmental compliance. Additionally, they offer the dual benefit of enabling employees to measure, monitor, and reduce energy and resource use as well as emissions across the enterprise.

Looking further into 2010, we expect the pace of construction projects to accelerate with environmental, particularly air permitting, to be on the critical path of these efforts. In addition, EPA and State inspection and enforcement of data centers appears to be a focus area as the agencies become more aware of this industry and the potential for fines for non-compliance.

Look for a future case study that describes Dixon Environmental’s efforts with instituting an electronic database tracking system for a major commercial data center which is undergoing rapid growth due in large part to the Obama Administration’s emphasis on “cloud computing.”