The impact of data centres on corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies is being hidden by the lack of clear energy efficiency definitions.

According to global IT and data centre consortium The Green Grid’s “EMEA Research on Data Centre Energy and Resource Efficiency”, 43% of companies do not define energy efficiency objectives, casting doubts over both how they are monitored and their CSR strategy contribution.

Nearly all (95%) of companies said they are measuring efficiency, yet, 55% still do not have configuration management in place.

This is despite 88% of IT leaders saying that design and operations of their data centres are an important part of CSR strategy and 97% saying that improvements to monitor the environmental impact of data centres are needed.

Roel Castelein, EMEA marketing chair at The Green Grid, said: “Whilst organizations are always looking to maximize their CSR, by not implementing clear definitions of what constitutes energy efficiency, many IT leaders are failing to tap into the contribution that data centres could provide to achieve these results.

“This lack of definition also makes it difficult for organizations to measure and monitor how the data centres could be improved over time to become greener.”

Elsewhere, the research has found that visualization is the number one energy efficient strategy for most organizations (42%).

The Green Grid said that visualization has become a popular option for organizations recently, as “they continue to benefit from the lower number of physical servers – especially those running for prolonged periods of time, reducing the overall energy required to power and cool them”.

The survey took into consideration the views of 150 IT decision makers at end-user organizations, including companies who run their own data centres as well as colocation data centre providers.