E-Business Applications in a Cloud: an Opportunity for Small and Medium Enterprises to Go Green

Sustainability concerns are gaining ground as a better way to do business, because of its contribution to the triple bottom lineeconomically, environmentally, and socio-culturally (Graci & Dodds, 2008; Taylor, 2008). From this motive, the term Green has evolved in various business sectors with aim to substitute the use of toxic materials with non-toxic materials and non-sustainable practices/processes with more sustainable ones (Ijab et al, 2010). ICT use to transact business (e-business) is also urged to be green. Thus, the term green IT is currently used and is widely acknowledged for both its cost driven strategy, and as a source of opportunity, innovation, and competitive advantage (Porter & Kramer, 2006). Today, Green IT is considered as a strategic technology that will play a fundamental role in reengineering business and production processes to reduce the environmental footprint of organizations. Murugesan (2008) refers Green IT to environmentally sustainable IT and he defines it as "the study and practice of using computing resources efficiently to minimize environmental impact”. Other researchers also prefer the term “Green Information Systems (IS)” (Boudreau et al. 2008; Watson et al, 2010; Harmon and Auseklis (2009) and emphasize that the term Green IS incorporates the concept of Green IT and comprises a greater variety of possible initiatives to support sustainable business processes. A comprehensive overview of current research on Green IT is provided by Molla (2009) who argues that the terms green, eco-efficiency and sustainability are widely used amongst researchers.Nonetheless, there is a consensus that Green IT is aimed at increasing the energy efficiency of IT operations and enhancing the sustainable usage of material resources, and it includes the environmental dimension of sustainable IS management. In addition, the efficiency enhancements also contribute to the economic sustainability through saving costs. Thus, Green IT represents the intersection of information management with the environmental and economic dimension of corporate sustainability and the process of corporate greening (Molla 2009). This study will often use the term Green E-Business, to mean an environmentally friendly (ecological and energy efficient) use of ICT to transact business. Green E-Business thus intends achieving eco-efficiency, eco-effectiveness, eco-legitimacy and eco-profitability use of IT in production, customer focused, and internal management processes of business firms. As such, many initiatives have been undertaken to make ICT use green in order to address the challenges of increasing power consumption and CO2 emissions. Included in these are virtualization, data centre consolidation, application reduction, data de-duplication, server and PC refresh; mobile computing; power management; print management; redeployment, reuse and recycling; and through cloud computing. However, evidences show that only few enterprises has adopted these methods, and mostly being the large firms, with small and medium enterprises (SMEs) left behind. The situation is even worse in developing countries caused by – size, and their inadequacy in resources (such as funding, skills and personnel); and,