Green IT is rising steadily up the UK corporate priority list but still lags behind traditional topics of concern, such as security, legacy software, data quality and server consolidation.

Research by the Corporate IT Forum of 150 large organisations found that 81 per cent consider environmentally friendly IT to have increased in importance in the past year.

Green IT was listed at number eight on the priority agenda, and the survey revealed that cost efficiency is the most important motivation behind green policies for 69 per cent of managers.

Just over half indicated that they view green IT policies as an opportunity to save money.

Nearly one in five respondents said that their organisations are engaged in some form of carbon offsetting, 15 per cent are recycling data centre heating, while just 12 per cent had installed cooling equipment in the data centre.